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FREEBORN" GARRETTS' 



■ON 



Freeborn Garrettson 



By 

EZRA S. TIPPLE 

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NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 




Copyright, 1 910, by 
EATON & MAINS 



TO THE 

NEW YORK CONFERENCE 

IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR HONORED DEAD 
AND WITH AFFECTIONATE AND FRATERNAL 
REGARD FOR ITS LIVING MEMBERS, WHO 
SO WORTHILY REPRESENT TO THIS 
GENERATION THE SPIRIT, PUR- 
POSE, AND ENTERPRISE 
OF THE FATHERS 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

Prefatory Note 7 

I. Estimate 9 

II. In the Maryland Wilderness 12 

III. The Summoning Voice 29 

IV. In the Saddle 40 

V. The Missionary 56 

VI. The New York Conference 64 

VII. The Home on the Hudson 74 

VIII. The Preacher and Teacher 95 

IX. The Ecclesiastic 104 

X. His Personality 114 

XI. The Itinerant's Last Journey 123 



5 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The sources to which I have gone for 
information concerning Freeborn Garrettson 
are: The Life of Garrettson, by Nathan 
Bangs, written by him at the request of the 
family; Garrettson's Journal, which was 
brought out in 1791 and contained an ac- 
count of his experiences and travels up to 
June 28, 1790; his manuscript Journals, 
manuscript Notes on his Printed Journals, 
and an incomparable collection of Garrett- 
son letters and papers in Drew Theological 
Seminary; the Semicentennial Sermon 
which he preached before the New York 
Conference in 1826 ; Asbury's Journal, Lee's 
Short History of the Methodists, and the 
various other histories of American Metho- 
dism, together with numerous other books 
relating directly or indirectly to the period 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church covered 
by his life. 

The picture of Garrettson which ap- 
pears in Bangs's Life of Garrettson, and 
which has been reproduced many times 
since, is from a painting by Paradise and 
engraved by Durand. The picture in this 
7 



8 Prefatory Note 



volume is from a miniature portrait, 
painted by J. Thomson for Mrs. Garrett- 
son, and which remained in the family until 
the death of Miss Garrettson, when it came 
into the possession of Drew Theological 
Seminary, where it now is. It has never 
before been reproduced, and is of peculiar 
interest inasmuch as it was a favorite pic- 
ture with both Mrs. and Miss Garrettson. 



CHAPTER I 



ESTIMATE 

It is not my purpose to attempt to estab- 
lish Freeborn Garrettson's place in Metho- 
dist history. That has already been done, 
and his place is forever secure. John New- 
ton, speaking of Whitefield's eloquence, 
said : "If any man were to ask me who as a 
preacher was second of all I have ever 
heard I should be at some loss; but in re- 
gard to the first, Mr. Whitefield so far 
exceeded every man of his time that I should 
be at no loss." By common consent Francis 
Asbury is given the highest seat among 
the fathers of American Methodism. And 
while there may be some honest difference 
of opinion as to who should rank next to 
him in the first half century of our history, 
the consensus of opinion of Methodist his- 
torians would seem to accord that honorable 
distinction to Freeborn Garrettson. Dr. 
Bangs, in his History of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, says that at the time of 
Garrettson's admission into the itinerant 
ranks in 1775 the number of preachers was 
only 19, and members in the societies 3,148, 
9 



1 0 Freeborn Garrettson 



and at the time of his death in 1827 these 
had increased to 1,642 preachers, and church 
members 421,105, and adds, "and perhaps 
no individual preacher contributed more, if 
indeed as much, to promote this spread of 
the work than the Rev. Freeborn Garrett- 
son" ; and no man of his generation was 
better qualified by personal acquaintance 
with Garrettson, by wide observation and 
knowledge of men, and by superior intel- 
lectual attainments to give Garrettson's 
measure than Nathan Bangs. 

A recent writer in the Methodist Review 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 
says : "I doubt whether Freeborn Garrettson 
has received his due recognition in our 
early history. The fact that he was a Mary- 
lander, a man of wealth with perhaps not 
a little of the old aristocratic air clinging to 
him, and that he had married into an old 
and wealthy family in New York, may have 
come in between him and his humbler 
brethren of the North, and the fact that he 
was an avowed antislavery man of the most 
intense type, and opposed to the rule of 
Asbury and McKendree, as it existed, may 
have had something to do with his want of 
popular favor in the South; but whatever 
the cause, I think the fact I have recog- 



Estimate 



nized is unquestionable, and yet the Church 
has produced few men whose influence for 
good has been greater and few men whose 
history has had in it more features of ro- 
mantic interest." 

While unquestionably there is some basis 
of fact in the opinion as thus expressed, 
Garrettson has not at any time since his 
death been in eclipse. Neither was he in 
his life. Who of his brethren could throw 
him into shadow? Not Jesse Lee, nor 
Ezekiel Cooper, nor John Dickins ; not Ben- 
jamin Abbott, nor Thomas Ware, nor Caleb 
Pedicord ; not Richard Whatcoat, nor Will- 
iam McKendree. There were men of that 
generation who were more celebrated 
preachers, and there were those who were 
better scholars, but, all in all, itinerant, mis- 
sionary, preacher, statesman, in that first 
generation of Methodist itinerants, there 
was only one man who o'ertopped him, and 
that man was Francis Asbury. And who- 
ever knows the position accorded by his- 
torians to this greatest ecclesiastic of 
American Christianity in the three or four 
decades following the Revolutionary War 
will appreciate that to be ranked next to 
him is no insignificant or meager distinc- 
tion. 



CHAPTER II 



IN THE MARYLAND "WILDERNESS 

"I was born in the year of our Lord 
1752." It is with this statement that Free- 
born Garrettson begins the first part of his 
Journal, which he entitles "A short account 
of my life till I was justified by faith." 
The date was August 15; the place, the 
State of Maryland near the mouth of the 
Susquehanna River. His grandfather was 
an immigrant from Great Britain and among 
the first settlers on the west side of the 
Chesapeake Bay. His parents were com- 
municants of the Church of England, and 
their children were brought up in the forms 
and usages of that Church. His father 
was a very moral man and was considered 
by his neighbors an eminent Christian. For 
him, as for his mother, Garrettson always 
had great affection. His mother was deeply 
religious, having come under the influence 
of the preaching of George Whitefield, who 
in his various itinerant journeys in America 
produced an impression which long con- 
tinued. She had also heard Gilbert Ten- 
12 



In the Maryland Wilderness 13 

nent, an eminent Presbyterian minister, and 
one of the minister-sons of the distinguished 
William Tennent, who is regarded as one 
of the chief founders of Princeton Uni- 
versity, and had been led by his preaching 
to religious contemplation and activity. Her 
son gave as his testimony in later years that 
although she lived in a "very dark day" she 
most certainly had "inward religion/' which 
seems to have been a rare experience be- 
fore the Methodist itinerants invaded Mary- 
land for the purpose of spreading scriptural 
holiness. 

Garrettson's biographer thinks that Gar- 
rettson's parents entirely mistook the char- 
acter of their child, believing him "prone 
to pride, self-will, and stubbornness," but 
what they deemed pride proved only a noble, 
chivalrous spirit, ready at all times to frown 
on meanness and to defend the oppressed, 
and that what they thought self-will was 
only the love of freedom and independence, 
and that his stubbornness, when fully de- 
veloped, became decision of character. 

The boy was early taught the Lord's 
Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, 
the Catechism, "and all other things which 
a Christian ought to know and believe to 
his soul's health/' in accordance with the 



14 Freeborn Garrettson 



parental vows made at his baptism. Gar- 
rettson was always religiously sensitive. He 
was strangely swayed all his life by his 
" feelings. " When he was but seven years 
of age he had an experience which "sensi- 
bly moved" him, although he did not com- 
prehend in the least measure its spiritual 
import. On another occasion, some two 
years later, as he was walking alone through 
the fields it seemed to him that he heard a 
voice saying, "Ask, and it shall be given 
you/' and he was immediately drawn out 
in desire to know what it meant; and, he 
says, it was borne in upon his mind that this 
was a token for good, and he immediately 
became conscious of a new spirit of joy. 
The Holy Spirit was plainly at work in his 
heart, though if some one had asked him 
concerning the Holy Ghost, as Paul did cer- 
tain disciples at Ephesus, he probably would 
have replied in the same terms they used, 
"We have not so much as heard whether 
there be any Holy Ghost." The state of 
religion in Maryland during Garrettson's 
boyhood was at a low ebb, but as always, 
there were unseen spiritual forces, silent, 
mysterious, which were at work. 

Shortly after the incident mentioned 
above he was again alone by himself, and 



In the Maryland Wilderness 15 



once more a voice was heard. He knew 
not whence it came, whether from the whis- 
pering trees or from the depths of his own 
heart, but it was as plain and real as if 
spoken by some friend face to face with 
him: "Do you know what a saint is?" It 
was all so real that he answered, "There 
are no saints on earth in this our day" ; and 
the same strange voice replied, "A saint is 
one who is wholly given up to God"; and 
instantly he saw such a person "in idea," 
as Garrettson phrases it, the most beautiful 
that his eyes had ever beheld ! The vision 
so affected him that he expressed aloud a 
desire to bear such a character, and to him 
there was given a "strong assurance" that 
such should be his experience, and again a 
spirit of joy flooded his heart. 

His mother died when he was about ten 
years of age, but he never forgot the ad- 
monitions which she gave him. After her 
going away, a sorrow which was followed 
by other griefs, he became melancholy and 
frequently went alone to weep. A modern 
specialist would likely say that it was a 
case of disordered nerves! He knew that 
he wanted something but did not know 
what, and instead of purchasing a treatise 
on medicine bought a pocket Testament, 



16 Freeborn Garrettson 



which he read, often with bitter sighs and 
broken prayers. 

When he was twelve years of age he 
went to school, where, he says, "I threw of? 
all serious thoughts about another world 
and was as full of play and mischief as 
others of my age." Though Garrettson 
frequently condemns himself and brings 
numerous charges against himself, there is 
nothing to suggest that he was openly and 
flagrantly sinful, he himself saying, "I did 
not run into scandalous witness." He left : 
school somewhere about 1770, and by that 1 
time there was a good deal of talk in Balti- 1 
more County and elsewhere concerning 1 
"the people called Methodists." The begin- 
nings of American Methodism date from 
1766, when Philip Embury began regular 
preaching in the city of New York. This 
is not the place to discuss the question 
whether the work of Strawbridge in Mary- 
land antedates the work in New York. The 
best historians in America, such as Stevens, 
than whom no greater denominational his- k 
torian has yet been raised up among us; 
Atkinson, whose researches concerning the 
beginnings of the Wesleyan movement in 
America are both invaluable and as yet 
incontrovertible; Wakeley, Buckley, Faulk- 

1 



In the Maryland Wilderness 17 



ner, and others unite in giving the prefer- 
ence to New York. The date of Straw- 
bridge's first sermon in Maryland may 
never be known, since the year of his ar- 
rival in America has not been definitely de- 
termined (Crook, who made a careful study 
of all the Irish line of evidence, does not 
think that he left Ireland before 1766) ; 
but whatever the year he began, whether 
before or after Embury, this man who 
founded Methodism in Baltimore and Har- 
ford Counties in Maryland, restless by na- 
ture, and conscious of the needs of the new 
settlements which were unvisited by the 
lethargic clergy of the English Church, went 
in every direction preaching with glowing 
lips the sure word of the gospel. "Every- 
where he went he raised up preachers," and 
whenever he preached sinners were con- 
verted. It was this flaming herald who was 
the first Methodist to be seen and heard 
by the young man in Maryland who had but 
recently returned from school and entered 
upon a life of carelessness and indifference. 
His picture of Strawbridge is doubtless the 
best one we have of that early preacher: 
"Mr Strawbridge came to the house of a 
gentleman near where I lived to stay all 
night. I had never heard him preach, but 



18 Freeborn Garrettson 



as I had a great desire to be in company 
with a person who had caused so much talk 
in the country I went over and sat and 
heard him converse till nearly midnight, and 
when I retired it was with these thoughts, 
'I have never spent a few hours so agreea- 
bly in my life/ He spent most of the time 
in explaining Scripture and giving interest- 
ing anecdotes." And it is not thinkable 
that that great winner of souls would have 
allowed the earnest young fellow who lis- 
tened to him so eagerly to withdraw without 
some word concerning his personal salva- 
tion. 

Garrettson's conversion was not without 
signs and wonders, divine warnings and 
divine interpositions. It is difficult to say 
just when the process was begun. In a 
letter to Wesley in 1785 he wrote: "This 
spring is fourteen years since I was power- 
fully convinced without use of human 
means"; which would fix the date of his 
awakening as 1771, when he was nineteen 
years of age. In the same letter he says, 
"It was three years from my conviction be- 
fore I was brought through the pangs of 
the new birth." During these years much 
happened, and to his sensitive soul every 
event had a spiritual significance. Such en- 



In the Maryland Wilderness 19 



tries as these are to be found in his Journal, 
which is a record of soul disclosures scarcely- 
paralleled in religious literature: "One day 
as I was passing over a rapid stream, a 
log on which I had frequently gone gave 
way, and I was near being swept down the 
stream; after struggling awhile I got out, 
though much wounded among the sharp 
rocks. This query struck my mind with 
great weight, 'What would have become of 
your soul had you been drowned?' I wept 
bitterly, and prayed to the Lord under a 
sense of my guilt. Still my stubborn heart 
was not willing to submit, though I began 
to carry a little hell in my bosom." How 
strange it is that remorse awakened by some 
grave peril so quickly dies out, and the 
vows made in moments of thankfulness 
over some deliverance from sudden death 
are soon forgotten! Garrettson a little 
later found himself in still greater danger. 
"In May, 1772, as I was riding out one 
afternoon, I went down a descent, over a 
large broad rock; my horse stumbled and 
threw me ; and with the fall on the rock and 
the horse blundering over me I was beaten 
out of my senses. When I recovered in some 
measure I praised God, as well as I knew 
how, for my deliverance; and before I 



20 Freeborn Garrettson 

moved from the place I promised to serve 
him all the days of my life." He at once 
procured the best religious books that he 
could obtain, and in retirement read much. 
Up to this time he had heard but two or 
three Methodist preachers. He had, as he 
says, the form of godliness; fasted once a 
week, prayed frequently daily in secret, and 
attended church regularly, but whenever he 
•went to hear Methodist preaching, as he did 
now occasionally, his "poor foundations 
would shake," especially under the preach- 
ing of George Shadford. When Asbury 
came into the country he went to hear him, 
and "his doctrine seemed as salve to a 
'festering wound." He followed the great 
preacher to another place, with this result: 
"He began to wind me about in such a man- 
ner that I found my sins in clusters as it 
were around me, and the law in its purity 
probing to the very bottom and discovering 
the defects of my heart; I was ready to 
cry out, 'How does this stranger know me 
so well? , " 

His father began to be troubled concern- 
ing him, and one night talked with him till 
midnight. "I have no objections," said he, 
"to your being religious, but why should 
you turn from the Church?" Garrettson 



In the Maryland Wilderness 21 



had already begun to have, it would appear, 
some leanings toward the Methodists, One 
day as *he was riding home he met a 
young man who had been hearing the 
Methodists, who talked to him so sweetly 
about Jesus and his people, and recom- 
mended Christ in such a winning fashion, 
that Garrettson was deeply convinced that 
there was a reality in that religion, and that 
it was time for him to take an open stand. 
Another day he met with a zealous Metho- 
dist exhorter who asked him if he had been 
born again. Not long since a young friend 
of mine heard a woman of another denom- 
ination say with a sneer, "I wouldn't be a 
Methodist; why, the Methodists say you 
have to be born again." Yes, indeed ! But 
did not the Master also say that same thing? 

Garrettson "could not easily forget the 
words of that pious young man"; they 
seemed to him like spears running through 
him! Thus matters continued until June, 
1775, a day which Garrettson never forgot. 
As the day was breaking he awoke, 
"alarmed by an awful voice." "You are 
not prepared to die," was the ominous an- 
nouncement which was "thundered down" 
upon his soul. Starting from his pillow, he 
cried out, "Lord, if this be the case, have 



22 Freeborn Garrettson 



mercy upon me." "In the evening," he 
says, "it was strongly pressed on my mind 
to go and hear a Methodist sermon. Though 
it was a very rainy evening I went, and for 
the first time heard Brother Ruff." Shortly 
after he heard him again. Daniel Ruff was 
one of the earliest native preachers raised up 
in America; "honest, simple Daniel Ruff," 
Asbury called him. There may be ground 
for controversy as to where were the be- 
ginnings of Methodism in America, but 
there can be no question as to where the 
first native preachers were brought into the 
ranks of the itinerant ministry. There was 
William Watters, who w r as born in Balti- 
more County, Maryland, in 1751, the year 
before Garrettson, and who was converted 
in 1771, and began to preach the following 
year. He has been called "the first native 
itinerant," though recent investigations 
w T ould seem to make it clear that Edward 
Evans, one of Whitefield's converts in Phil- 
adelphia, who allied himself with the Metho- 
dists and was given permission to preach, 
is entitled to that distinction, even though, 
dying before the meeting of the first Con- 
ference in 1773, his name has no place on 
the official records of our American Metho- 
dism. And there was Philip Gatch, born in 



In the Maryland Wilderness 23 



Maryland the same year as Watters, who 
entered the itinerancy and upon a dis- 
tinguished career the same year as Wat- 
ters, though his name does not appear in 
the Minutes until 1774. And there was 
Daniel Ruff, who was converted in Harford 
County in the great religious excitement 
which prevailed in that and Baltimore 
County during 1771. The next year his 
house became a "preaching place/' and in 
1773 he began his itinerant ministry. It 
was after a sermon by this man that Gar- 
rettson came into the light. Let him tell the 
story in his own words: "After preaching 
was over I called in with Daniel Ruff at 
Mrs. Cough's, and stayed until about nine 
o'clock. On my way home, being much dis- 
tressed, I alighted from my horse in a lonely 
wood, and bowed my knee before the Lord ; 
I sensibly felt two spirits, one on each hand. 
The good spirit set forth to my innocent 
mind the beauties of religion, and I seemed 
almost ready to lay hold on my Saviour. 
Then would the enemy rise up on the other 
hand, and dress religion in as odious a garb 
as possible ; yea, he seemed in a moment of 
time to set the world and the things of it in 
the most brilliant colors before me, telling 
me all those things should be mine if I would 



24 Freeborn Garrettson 



give up my false notions, and serve him. I 
continued on my knees a considerable time, 
and at last began to give way to the reason- 
ing of the enemy. My tender feelings 
abated, and my tears were gone; my heart 
was hard, but I continued on my knees in 
a kind of meditation, and at last addressed 
my Maker thus : 'Lord, spare me one year 
more, and by that time I can put my worldly 
affairs in such a train that I can serve 
thee/ (I seemed as if I felt the two 
spirits with me.) The answer was, 'Now 
is the accepted time.' I then pleaded for 
six months, but was denied ; one month, no ; 
I then asked for one week, the answer was, 
'This is the time.' For some time the devil 
was silent, till I was denied one week in 
his service ; then it was that he shot a power- 
ful dart. 'The God/ said he, 'you are at- 
tempting to serve is a hard master; and I 
would have you to desist from your en- 
deavor/ Carnal people know very little of 
this kind of exercise ; but it was as percepti- 
ble to me as if I had been conversing with 
two people face to face. As soon as this 
powerful temptation came I felt my heart 
rise sensibly, and immediately I arose from 
my knees with these words : 'I will take my 
own time, and then I will serve thee/ I 



In the Maryland Wilderness 25 



mounted my horse with a hard, unbelieving 
heart, unwilling to submit to Jesus. O, what 
a good God I had to deal with ! I might in 
justice have been sent to hell. I had not 
rode a quarter of a mile before the Lord 
met me powerfully with these words: ( 1 
have come once more to offer you life and 
salvation, and it is the last time: choose or 
refuse.' I was instantly surrounded with a 
divine power: heaven and hell were dis- 
closed to view, and life and death were set 
before me. I do believe, if I had rejected 
this call, mercy would have been forever 
taken from me. I knew the very instant, 
when I submitted to the Lord and was will- 
ing that Christ should reign over me : I like- 
wise knew the two sins which I parted with 
last, pride and unbelief. I threw the reins 
of my bridle on my horse's neck, and put- 
ting my hands together, cried out, 'Lord, I 
submit' I was less than nothing in my own 
sight, and was now for the first time recon- 
ciled to the justice of God. The enmity of 
my heart was slain, the plan of salvation 
was open to me, I saw beauty in the per- 
fection of the Deity, and I felt the power of 
faith and love that I had ever been a 
stranger to before." If he knew that 
glorious hymn of Doddridge, 



26 Freeborn Garrettson 



" 'Tis done : the great transaction's done ! 
I am my Lord's, and he is mine; 
He drew me and I followed on, 
Charmed to confess the voice divine," 

he must have sung it, for it is said that hav- 
ing found the pearl of great price he was 
exceedingly happy, and began to shout the 
praises of his Redeemer. Modern con- 
versions may be more decorous, and it may 
be they are just as complete, but when 
Garrettson, who had not run the gamut 
of sin and shame in his personal life — our 
modern religious psychologists and advo- 
cates of "educational conversion" gen- 
erously say that some demonstration on the 
part of a Jerry McAuley is pardonable — 
found God, u the stars seemed so many 
seraphs going forth in their Maker's praise." 
He praised God aloud. As he neared the 
house the servants heard him shouting and 
rushed out to meet him in surprise. It did 
not take them long to discover that some- 
thing had happened. He called the family 
together, and his prayer was turned into 
praise. Temptations soon beset him, and 
for a time he was in perplexity. Great 
souls often have to wade through deep 
waters. But before many days passed there 
were indisputable evidences that his con- 



In the Maryland Wilderness 27 



version was complete. One Sunday morn- 
ing — this is one of the most interesting in- 
cidents in Garrettson's whole life — although 
he was still unsettled in his mind, from a 
sense of duty he summoned the household 
for prayer. "As I stood with a book in my 
hand in the act of giving out a hymn" — I 
give his own account of the event — "this 
thought powerfully struck my mind: 'It is 
not right for you to keep your fellow crea- 
tures in bondage, you must let the oppressed 
go free.' I knew it was that same blessed 
voice which had spoken to me before; till 
then I had never suspected that the practice 
of slavekeeping was wrong ; I had not read 
a book on the subject or been told so by 
any. I paused a minute and then replied, 
'Lord, the oppressed shall go free'; and I 
was as clear of them in my mind as if I had 
never owned one. I told them they did not 
belong to me, and that I did not desire their 
services without making them a compensa- 
tion. I was now at liberty to proceed in 
worship. After singing I kneeled to pray. 
Had I the tongue of an angel I could not 

' have fully described what I felt. All my 
dejection and that melancholy gloom which 

i preyed upon me vanished in a moment, and 
a divine sweetness ran through my whole 

1 

ii 



28 Freeborn Garrettson 



frame." Could anyone doubt that there 
had been a real change of heart after such 
an unexpected proof o the sincerity of his 
new purpose ? It was in keeping, moreover, 
with Garrettson's subsequent career. There 
at that home service was given the first 
earnest of his hatred of slavery and of his 
long fight for the oppressed. Freeborn Gar- 
rettson was a new man in Christ Jesus. 
His conversion was as complete as that of 
Saint Paul, the currents of his thought and 
life having undergone in some respects 
quite as radical changes. From this hour, 
when it was borne in upon him that some 
things which hitherto he had considered 
right, were not right, he submitted all 
questions, all plans, all actions, all attitudes 
to the new standard which he found in 
Christ Jesus his Lord. 



CHAPTER III 



THE SUMMONING VOICE 

The matter of a call to the Christian 
ministry is a complex one. Spurgeon used 
to say that he was foreordained to be a 
preacher, and it does seem as if we should 
make that concession to his sturdy Calvin- 
ism, so remarkable was the prophecy ut- 
tered by Richard Knill, a representative 
of the London Missionary Society, who, a 
visitor to the parsonage in which Spurgeon's 
father lived, as he was leaving took the boy 
of ten years on his knee and said: "I do 
not know how it is, but I feel a solemn pre- 
sentiment that this child will preach the 
gospel to thousands. So sure am I of this 
that when you, my little man, preach in 
Rowland Hill's Chapel, as you will one day, 
I should like you to give out the hymn com- 
mencing, 

" 'God moves in a mysterious way 
His wonders to perform/ " 

a prophecy which years later was fulfilled 
to the letter. Some men come into the min- 



29 



30 Freeborn Garrettson 



istry, as Burton says, "by the pull of numer- 
ous forces." Often the call is as the blow- 
ing of the wind, something mysterious, 
almost intangible even. Again it is as potent 
as the luminous cross seen by Constantine 
in his march to Rome, or the spirit-voices 
heard by Joan of Arc. Horace Bushnell 
used to tell of his grandmother, a godly 
woman, up in the wilds of Vermont, who 
started a religious public service, had her 
timid husband make the prayers, and called 
into service the talents of an unchristian 
young man of the region for the reading 
of a printed sermon from Sunday to Sun- 
day. After a time she reached the con- 
clusion that he had the making of a preacher 
in him, and said to him one day as he came 
from the pulpit that God wanted him to be 
a Methodist minister. "But I am not a 
Christian," he said. "No matter, you are 
called to be a Christian and a preacher both, 
in one call, as Saul was." That young man 
was Elijah Hedding. 

Methodism has never believed, as some 
good people seem to believe these days, 
that "anyone who feels a turn for it, in the 
ordinary sense of the word, is entitled to 
enter the ministry." It surely was not so 
in the early days of Methodism. Whitefield 



The Summoning Voice 



31 



struggled long and hard between an inclina- 
tion for the stage and the conviction that he 
must preach. "I have prayed a thousand 
times/' he said, "till the sweat has dripped 
from my face like rain." It may be that 
Methodism has stood for a more marked 
call than some other denominations, but it 
most assuredly has believed in the necessity 
of a distinctive call. The Old Testament, as 
has been said, is largely a record of "calls" ; 
likewise the biographies of Methodist 
preachers. So far as I am familiar with the 
biographical literature of Methodism I do 
not recall a single instance where one of 
our preachers has taken the field except 
upon command. Bishop Scott testifies that 
after his conversion the burden of the Lord 
came upon him and the Spirit of God com- 
missioned him to preach with the solemn 
words, "Away! Away! labor for God and 
souls." 

Thus also was Freeborn Garrettson 
called to preach. It was not long after the 
happy experiences of grace recorded in the 
preceding chapter that he received "a strong 
impression" that he should go immediately 
to a certain place and declare to those whom 
he might find there what the Lord had done 
for him. He mounted his horse, went to 



32 Freeborn Garrettson 



the designated place, found a company of 
friends and relatives, but the cross was 
too heavy for him, and after remaining 
there for several hours "without bearing 
testimony/' he returned home in "deep dis- 
tress of soul." That was the beginning of 
a conflict which was to continue for nearly 
a year before Garrettson's surrender to God 
was complete. 

Shortly after this he felt it to be his duty 
to hold religious meetings in various places, 
principally at his own house, and at that of 
his brother John, where a blessed work of 
grace broke out. He had not yet joined 
the Methodists, though his leanings were 
now in that direction. God was leading him 
gradually. He had read some of Mr. Wes- 
ley's writings and had some considerable 
knowledge of Methodist people, but at the 
beginning of his Christian life he felt a 
distinct repugnance to being known as a 
Methodist. It was his purpose to nurture 
his spiritual life by monastic fastings and 
in the gloom of cloister silences, but this 
unnatural and unscriptural resolve was as 
swiftly shattered by a shaft of religious ex- 
perience as a forest tree is riven by light- 
ning. What a wonderful teacher the Holy 
Spirit is! Garrettson's opposition to the 



The Summoning Voice 33 

Methodists shortly began to melt away. One 
Sunday he went to the church where he 
had been accustomed to worship, and no- 
ticed, possibly for the first time, that before 
the service the people "gathered in little 
companies, the old men talking about the 
price of grain, their farms and crops, and 
the younger people about horse-raising and 
the like." The scene shocked his sensitive 
religious feelings, and the sermon later con- 
vinced him that there was no spiritual food 
for him there. That evening he went, to 
use his own phrase, "to hear Methodist 
preaching," and it was of the sort to stir 
his soul to its depths, and he went home de- 
termined "to choose God's people for my 
people." A few days later he journeyed ten 
miles to attend a class meeting, "and was 
convinced that it was a prudential means" ; 
and was his conclusion not a right one? 
The leaven of God's purpose for him was 
working. The next step which Garrettson 
was led to take was to invite Mr. Rodda, a 
Methodist itinerant whom he had already 
met, to come to his house and preach. 
If he did not want to become a preacher — 
and there is abundant proof that he did not 
— that was a dangerous thing for him to do, 
for those early Methodist preachers were 



34 Freeborn Garrettson 



on the watch everywhere for recruits. The 
very next day after Rodda's arrival he per- 
emptorily told Garrettson that he must ac- 
company him on his circuit, which the young 
man did, exhorting the people by Rodda's 
direction. But at the end of nine days Gar- 
rettson announced his intention of return- 
ing to his home, and when Rodda pressed 
him for the reason Garrettson told him 
bluntly that he "was not disposed to be a 
traveling preacher/' as if that settled the 
question. 

The details of Garrettson's struggles to 
escape what he must have suspected was 
the will of God for him would seem almost 
incredible to modern readers. They were as 
realistic and as wearing upon his health as 
were those of Saint Francis. Rankin, hav- 
ing heard that his mind was in a tumult 
respecting the ministry, sent for him and 
gave him such salutary advice that the 
storm-tossed soul was comforted for the 
moment, but almost immediately Satan 
again buffeted him, and once more he is 
in doubt. He has an engagement to speak 
but is unwilling to use a text, and finds him- 
self unable to speak with any degree of 
freedom. As he journeyed to another ap- 
pointment he was in so great perplexity 



The Summoning Voice 35 



through doubt and fear that he even wished 
his horse would throw him and thus end his 
life. When he preached in his native place 
to a multitude who had come from far and 
near to hear him, just as he gave out his 
text, "The great day of his wrath is come, 
and who shall be able to stand ?" the burden 
of responsibility was so overpowering that 
he fainted and fell to the ground. Thus 
the conflicts continued month after month. 
There is a famous passage in his Journal 
which shows the straits he was in: "It was 
now the enemy told me there was no way 
for me to prevent or get clear of those 
itinerating impressions than to alter my 
condition in life. The thought was pleas- 
ing, insomuch that I employed carpenters 
to put an addition to my house." "The 
object was soon fixed on and I paid her a 
visit, told her my mind, and set a time when 
I should expect to know her mind" ; but, 
as he quaintly says, "the hand of the Lord 
was against it" ; for the night before he was 
to learn her decision he had a vision of his 
duty, and to quote his own words, "When 
I went downstairs I met the object in the 
hall and told her that I was convinced that 
the Lord had a greater work for me to do, 
and gave up the matter and withdrew to 



36 Freeborn Garrettson 



my home." But not yet even was his de- 
cision fixed. The enemy of his peace told 
him that the more he went among the 
Methodists, especially the preachers, the 
more his mind would be exercised about 
traveling. It was the itinerancy that af- 
frighted him, as it has many others since 
that day. He was willing to preach near 
his home, but the thought of wandering up 
and down the earth, he knew not where, 
appalled him. In a letter to Mr. Wesley in 
1785, nearly ten years after his joining the 
noble band of Methodist itinerants, he said, 
"Eight months elapsed after I was called 
to preach before I was willing to leave my 
all and go out. I wanted to live in retire- 
ment, and had almost got my own consent 
to sell what I had in the world and retire 
to a cell. God withdrew himself from me. 
. . . I was worn away to a skeleton. . . . 
Strong impressions I had to go forth in 
Jehovah's name to preach the gospel. When 
I thought of it I was pained to the very 
heart; it seemed like death, so great was 
the sense I had of my weakness and 
ignorance." 

But at last the struggles came to an end. 
Let Garrettson himself tell the story: "One 
day under deep distress I returned to my 



The Summoning Voice 37 



room, and appeared to be weary of life. 
I threw myself on the bed and within a few 
minutes was in a sound sleep, and I thought 
the devil came into the room and was about 
to lay hold on me. I thought the good angel 
spoke to me and said, 'Will you go and 
preach the gospel?' I cried out, 'Lord, 
there are many who are more fitted for the 
work than I am; send them, for I am too 
ignorant/ The good angel said, 'There is a 
dispensation of the gospel committed unto 
you, and woe is unto you if you preach 
not the gospel. Will you go and preach the 
gospel?' I knew it to be the voice of that 
same blessed Jesus that showed me that 
my sins were forgiven at the time of my 
conversion. There the devil was waiting 
and ready to drive me away. I cried out, 
'Lord, if thou wilt go with me I will go to 
the ends of the earth, or to the very mouth 
of hell, to preach the blessed gospel.' In a 
moment I saw the devil vanish away, and 
I awoke filled with joy; yea, my soul was 
so happy and I had such a strong confidence 
that I thought I should never doubt again. 
I wanted to tell somebody of the exercise 
of my mind, and forever adored be the name 
of the Lord, he made a way for me." The 
die was cast; henceforth for more than a 



38 Freeborn Garrettson 



half century he was to be a Methodist itin- 
erant preacher, and of all the goodly com- 
pany of itinerants there was no one who had 
a higher sense of the honor which had been 
conferred upon him by the divine summons 
to preach the gospel, or who realized more 
fully the necessity and import of such a set- 
ting apart for the work of the ministry. In 
1816 there was published "An Open Letter 
to the Rev. Lyman Beecher," in reply to a 
pamphlet written by him, and which, it 
seemed to the members of the New York 
Conference, contained some animadversions 
on the Methodist ministry. The letter was 
written by Garrettson, and its publication 
authorized by the Conference. In it he 
says, among other things : 

"Had you pointed out some Scripture 
marks of a call and qualification for the pure 
ministry, I should have thanked you; but 
you seemed to lay the whole stress on your 
seminaries, regularity, and settlement, all 
of which are only the letter. As you neg- 
lected the most important part, permit me 
to touch on a few particulars. The first is, 
the soul-regenerating grace of God, and the 
knowledge of him as a sin-pardoning God. 
The second is, a call from God to the work. 
The third is, a qualification for the work. 



The Summoning Voice 39 

"But how shall it be known that a man 
is called and qualified for the work? 

"i. He should have an evidence of God's 
love, and be so enlightened respecting divine 
things, as in some good degree to under- 
stand the spirituality of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and to know the way of salvation. 
2. A gift to edify, and a cordial reception 
from ministers and people, and to be made 
a blessing to the Church; 3. A pure love 
for souls ; 4. Blest in his labors in bringing 
souls to Christ; 5. A love for study, and a 
thirst for more grace and wisdom; 6. A 
humble, pious walk with God, accompanied 
by integrity of soul in his work. He can 
say, 'Follow me, as I follow Christ/ giving 
evidence to the flock that he takes the over- 
sight not for filthy lucre, but of a ready 
mind. Whom the blessed God thus sets 
apart to minister in his sanctuary, he owns 
and blesses. ,, 

This was written forty years after he had 
heard and obeyed the Voice, and it scarcely 
need be said that his own life furnished the 
most complete confirmation of his opinions 
as here expressed concerning the prerequi- 
site qualifications for a successful ministry. 



CHAPTER IV 



IN THE SADDLE 

Ryle says that Christianity was saved to 
the world in the eighteenth century by 
"spiritual cavalry who scoured the country 
and were found everywhere." Stevens, in 
his History of American Methodism, uses 
the same figure when he refers to the Metho- 
dist itinerants as "evangelical cavalry." A 
glance through the table of contents of that 
book more than justifies such characteriza- 
tion: "Rapid Advance of the Church," 
"Methodism Enters Kentucky," "Garrett- 
son Pioneers Methodism up the Hudson," 
"Asbury Itinerating in the South," "Mc- 
Kendree Goes to the West," "Colbert in 
the Wilderness," and the like. In every 
chapter you feel the rush and haste of those 
restless men. Every page breathes the re- 
sistless impulse of the Methodist evangelism. 
That classic of our Methodist literature, 
Asbury's Journal, abounds with references 
to his travels. Day after day he writes down 
with wearisome regularity, "I went," "I 
rode," "I came." During the forty-seven 
years of his itinerant career he rode more 
40 



In the Saddle 



41 



than two hundred and seventy-five thousand 
miles, almost all of them on horseback. One 
cannot understand early Methodist history 
unless he reads it as Asbury and Garrettson 
and the other itinerants traveled — in the 
saddle. About the time that Garrettson 
first heard of the Methodists the movements 
of the few itinerants who had already taken 
the field were so rapid that it is with diffi- 
culty that we follow them. Work for the 
year 1772 was planned on a large scale: 
Boardman was to enter New England, 
Wright to go to New York, Pilmoor to 
attack the South, and Asbury to remain in 
Philadelphia. In the autumn of that year 
Wesley directed Asbury to act as superin- 
tendent, and immediately the young leader 
started for the South, preaching as he went. 
In Baltimore he arranged a circuit of two 
hundred miles, with twenty-four appoint- 
ments, to be covered by him every three 
weeks, and it was on one of these rounds 
that Garrettson first saw and heard him. 
This same year Wesley sent reinforcements 
to America, Thomas Rankin and George 
Shadford, the former a Scotchman of rare 
energy and commanding success, the latter 
one of the most beautiful characters of early 
Methodism, and to whom Wesley gave the 



42 Freeborn Garrettson 



famous parting injunction: "I let you loose, 
George, on the great continent of America; 
publish your message in the open face of the 
sun, and do all the good that you can." 

In July, 1773, the first American Con- 
ference assembled in Philadelphia. An old 
print shows ten clerically frocked preachers 
in attendance: Thomas Rankin, Francis 
Asbury, Richard Boardman, Joseph Pil- 
moor, Richard Wright, George Shadford, 
Captain Thomas Webb, John King, Abra- 
ham Whitworth, and Joseph Yearbry, all 
Europeans, and all bent on the evangeliza- 
tion of the New World. Perhaps the most 
important action taken at this Conference 
was that the preachers should exchange at 
the end of every six months, which was what 
Asbury had desired from the beginning — 
"a circulation of preachers" — and undenia- 
bly one of the chief means of the unpre- 
cedented growth of Methodism in its first 
half century. Despite all the toils and hard- 
ships it involved, the early preachers re- 
garded the itinerancy as one of the most 
glorious institutions of their Church. The 
history of the Christian Church would seem 
to confirm their views. More than once has 
Christianity been saved to the world by 
wandering preachers. They were itinerants 



In the Saddle 43 



who in the early centuries of the Christian 
era made Christianity the dominant religion. 
Eight hundred years later, when religion 
had become a stench and a scandal, and the 
entire hierarchical system, like a stranded 
ship, was breaking in pieces, there appeared 
one day an itinerant, Saint Francis of Assisi, 
who so influenced men that in a few years, 
from the sierras of Spain to the steppes of 
Russia, from the Tiber to the Trent, the 
Baltic Sea and the Thames, the old faith 
in its fullest vigor was preached in almost 
every town and hamlet. The great Ref- 
ormation in the sixteenth century, of which 
John Wycliffe was the Morning Star, was 
heralded by the preaching of his itinerant 
priests; the Evangelical Revival of the 
eighteenth century was due in largest meas- 
ure, under the blessing of God, to the 
chivalrous loyalty, the unflagging zeal, the 
persistent faith and toil of Methodist itin- 
erants. What heroes they were! and with 
what superb abandon they went to their al- 
most superhuman tasks ! Literature does 
not disclose finer specimens of manhood, 
nor record deeds of more splendid valor. 

Garrettson entered upon his long itin- 
erant career in 1775, though it was not until 
the following year, at the Conference held 



44 Freeborn Garrettson 



in Baltimore, May 21, 1776, that he was 
formally received into the noble company 
of Methodist itinerants, men who, to use his 
own expression, were "thrust out" into the 
ministry. Was it not prophetic that he who 
was almost literally to live in the saddle was 
converted on horseback ? It would seem so. 

Garrettson's first appointment was to 
travel the Frederick Circuit with Daniel 
Rodda, where, under constant buffetings of 
Satan, repeated suggestions that he turn 
back home, and other trials so great that 
he was "tempted to envy the creeping in- 
sects," he nevertheless preached so effect- 
ively that many were awakened. At the 
end of six months he went to Fairfax Cir- 
cuit, where he labored three months, when 
Rodda thought it expedient to send him 
into the region known as Xew Virginia, 
where the people became so deeply attached 
to him that when he preached his farewell 
sermon the people were "bathed in tears," 
and entreated him not to leave them. His 
appointment the next year was to the 
famous Brunswick Circuit, where he was 
associated with Watters, at whose "preach- 
ing house" the Conference had been held, 
and John Tunnell, who was received on 
probation this year, a name fragrant to 



In the Saddle 45 



the Methodists of that early day, who after 
notable labors in the Middle States was 
sent in 1787 to East Tennessee, where he 
died three years later, his brethren bearing 
his remains back over the mountains that 
he might sleep among the hills of Virginia. 
What a brotherhood that of those early 
itinerants was ! With what ties of affection, 
a common purpose, religious fervor, and a 
deathless devotion they were bound to- 
gether! When Garrettson reached his cir- 
cuit and began to preach such scenes of 
grace were witnessed that the people felt 
him to be "a young Shadford," a significant 
characterization inasmuch as a few years 
before Shadford had swept as a flame of 
fire through all that region. Garrettson 
now itinerated southward into North Caro- 
lina, and at the Conference held at Lees- 
burg, Virginia, in 1778 (which was presided 
over by Watters, the senior native itinerant, 
Asbury being in seclusion because of the 
war then in progress), he was appointed to 
Kent Circuit, in Maryland. Here as else- 
where during these troublous years his faith 
was severely tested by the opposition which 
the preaching of those sturdy Methodist 
itinerants provoked, and by the prejudices 
against the Methodists which were created 



46 Freeborn Garrettson 



by the conditions, political and otherwise, 
incident to the Revolutionary War. Gar- 
rettson seems to have had almost more 
than his share of persecution. His recital 
of some of his hardships in a letter written 
to John Wesley from Halifax in 1785 reads 
like Saint Paul's account of his sufferings 
in Second Corinthians: "Once I was im- 
prisoned; twice beaten, left on the highway 
speechless and senseless; once shot at; 
guns and pistols presented at my breast; 
once delivered from an armed mob in the 
dead of night on the highway by a sur- 
prising flash of lightning; surrounded 
frequently by mobs; stoned frequently; I 
have had to escape for my life at dead 
time of night." But he lacked Paul's gift 
of climax or he could have told a more 
thrilling story. His experiences were cer- 
tainly thrilling enough. Much of the op- 
position was natural. It was of the sort 
which is always stirred up by the faithful 
preaching of the gospel. Paul met with 
it in almost every place. Wesley was 
repeatedly menaced by mobs. Garrettson 
was evil spoken of, refused permission to 
preach, and annoyed in petty ways. 

The rage of his enemies oftener, how- 
ever, took a more intimidating form. To 



In the Saddle 47 



a funeral which he conducted a woman 
came with the avowed intention of shoot- 
ing him, but was thwarted of her design. 
At another service, as he was giving out 
a hymn, some twenty roughs rushed at him, 
the ringleader seizing him and pressing a 
pistol against his breast; but Garrettson 
had seen God in a dream and was not per- 
turbed. He began to exhort, and soon the 
entire congregation was in tears. One 
day while riding in Queen Anne County, 
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a man 
who had formerly been a judge intercepted 
him, and taking his horse by the bridle 
began to beat the preacher over the head 
and shoulders with a club, calling mean- 
while for his servants to assist him. When 
Garrettson saw some of them coming with 
a rope he thought it time to beat a retreat, 
which fortunately he was able to do, only 
to be overtaken a little later and so cruelly 
beaten that he fell from his horse un- 
conscious. Providentially, as he says, a 
woman who had a lancet with her passed, 
and, bleeding him, as was the custom, he 
was restored to his senses, though it was 
supposed for a time that his injuries would 
prove fatal. One of his friends was shot, 
but not mortally, for entertaining him. He 



48 Freeborn Garrettson 



himself was in constant peril. At Dover, 
Delaware, he had scarcely dismounted be- 
fore he was surrounded by a mob, who 
cried lustily, "Hang him! hang him!" 
When he made an appointment to preach 
at the side of a river he was threatened 
with drowning, but one "dressed like a 
soldier" attended him on his journey, saying 
to him, "I heard you preach at such a time, 
and believe your doctrine to be true. I 
heard you were to be abused at the river 
to-day, and I equipped myself and have 
ridden twenty miles in your defense, and 
will go with you if it is a thousand miles 
and see who dare lay a hand upon you !" 

Garrettson's severest trials, however, 
were not the issue of his religious activity, 
but in consequence of his refusal on consci- 
entious grounds to take the "state oath" 
as it was called, that is, an oath of allegiance 
to the United States of America, as re- 
quired of all citizens when the war with 
Great Britain was begun. He declared 
himself a loyal American and a friend to 
the cause of freedom, but when he refused 
to take the oath because he thought it was 
so worded as to bind him to take up arms 
when called upon — and he felt no dispo- 
sition to bear "carnal weapons" — he was 



In the Saddle 49 



told that he must leave the State, or go to 
jail. The fact that he was a Methodist 
preacher augmented the feeling against 
him. All the Methodists were under sus- 
picion throughout the war, and particularly 
during the early years; there were good 
reasons for it. Wesley's "Calm Address 
to the American Colonies" would have 
created prejudice against them if nothing 
else had been said or done, but several of 
the preachers were indiscreet. Rankin 
spoke so freely and imprudently on public 
affairs as to cause fear that his influence 
would be dangerous to the American cause. 
Rodda was so unwise as to distribute 
copies of the king's proclamation, and left 
the country under circumstances unfavora- 
ble to his reputation and hurtful to the 
interests of religion. When the times were 
about at the worst Shadford returned to 
England, and, indeed, two years after the 
Declaration of Independence not an Eng- 
lish preacher remained in America except 
Asbury, who, at the risk of his life, de- 
liberately resolved to continue to labor and 
to suffer with and for his American 
brethren. His sympathies were undoubt- 
edly with his countrymen, but his unerring 
judgment, however, foresaw the inevitable 



50 Freeborn Garrettson 



outcome. Lednum tells of a letter which 
Asbury wrote to Rankin in 1777 in which 
he expressed his belief that the American 
people would become a free and independ- 
ent nation, and declared that he was too 
much knit in affection to many of them to 
leave them, and that Methodist preachers 
had a great work to do under God in 
America. The letter fell into the hands of 
the authorities in the Colonies and pro- 
duced a change in their feelings toward 
him, but before this change took place there 
was much suffering. 

It was asserted that the Methodist body 
was a Tory propaganda, though I can find 
no proof to establish the contention. In 
New York the leading members were 
thorough Loyalists; elsewhere the member- 
ship was divided in political sentiment, as 
were all communities at the time; but it is 
an indisputable fact that the prejudice 
against the Methodists was pronounced, 
and this prejudice was evidenced in much 
hostility. Jesse Lee, our first historian, 
says: "If a person was disposed to perse- 
cute a Methodist preacher it was only nec- 
essary to call him a Tory and then they 
might treat him as cruelly as they pleased." 
Judge White was arrested on the charge 



In the Saddle 



51 



of being a Methodist, and presumptively a 
Tory, but after five weeks' detention was 
acquitted. Asbury was compelled to go 
into retirement for many months; part of 
the time in almost absolute concealment. 
The native ministers who had been raised 
up, Watters, Gatch, Morrell, Ware, and 
Garrettson, were true-hearted Americans, 
and while the moral views and conscien- 
tious scruples of some of these, and many 
other Methodists, were not on general 
principles favorable to war, they were con- 
sistently loyal, even though many of them 
suffered persecution. It was a common 
experience for the preachers to be "hon- 
ored" with tar and feathers. Caleb Pedi- 
cord was cruelly whipped, and carried his 
scars to the grave. Joseph Hartley was im- 
prisoned, and during his confinement 
preached through the gratings of his win- 
dow to crowds of people. In many places 
our preachers were insulted, beaten, and 
maimed. Garrettson, because of his re- 
fusal to subscribe to the oath, was the 
object of more frequent attacks than any 
other preacher of the time. But he was 
without personal fear, and when friends 
at Salisbury, knowing that a mob was lying 
in wait for him, urged him to escape, his 



52 Freeborn Garrettson 



answer was, "I have come to preach my 
Master's gospel, and I am not afraid to 
trust him with body and soul." On another 
occasion a company of twelve men made 
him a prisoner and started to take him to 
jail some distance away. While they were 
en route, suddenly the darkness of the 
night was shattered with "a very uncom- 
mon flash of lightning, and in less than a 
minute all my foes were dispersed." But 
finally, in 1780, he was taken before a 
magistrate in Dorchester County, Mary- 
land, and put in jail at Cambridge, the keys 
being hidden to prevent his friends from 
ministering to him. "I had a dirty floor 
for my bed," he writes, "my saddlebags 
for my pillow, and two large windows open 
with a cold east wind blowing upon me, 
but I had great consolation in my dear 
Lord and could say, 'Thy will be done.' 99 
But he was by no means forsaken. Asbury 
wrote "to comfort him under his imprison- 
ment," and sent him a volume of Ruther- 
ford's letters. He also interceded for him, 
visiting the governor of Maryland on his 
behalf, with the result that Garrettson was 
soon set at liberty. Like Chrysostom he 
could say, "I bless God that I am not 
afraid of the jail." Whatever happened 



In the Saddle 53 



to him was for the furtherance of the 
gospel. As he once wrote after he had 
been stoned, "This is but trifling if I can 
win souls to Jesus." This period of trial 
for Garrettson and the other preachers 
was not without fruitage. Stevens says 
that not only did the Revolution prepare 
the societies for their organization as a dis- 
tinct denomination, but it can be affirmed 
that American Methodism was born and 
passed its whole infancy in the invigorating 
struggle of the Revolution, and that its 
almost continual growth in such apparent 
adverse circumstances is one of the marvels 
of religious history. To this growth Gar- 
rettson contributed his full share, both in 
the heroic endurance of the trials which 
awaited him in every place and in the 
abundance of his labors and the zeal and 
success with which he prosecuted the work 
to which he had consecrated his life. 

His labors during this period were tre- 
mendous, despite the grave impediments in 
his way. For instance, when he went to 
Sussex Circuit in 1781, Cornwallis was 
harassing the people of Virginia with his 
army, a condition unfriendly to the spread 
of Christianity. As this was the time of the 
siege and surrender of Cornwallis at York- 



54 Freeborn Garrettson 



town, he could hear the roar of cannon day 
and night. Lednum, an historian of Metho- 
dism, says that as the sum of this particular 
year's labor Garrettson traveled about five 
thousand miles and preached some five 
hundred sermons. These figures need not 
surprise us when the urgency of that early 
Methodist evangelism is recalled. Sin was 
an appalling fact, souls were in peril, the 
day of judgment was drawing on, men 
must be warned of their danger and told 
of a Saviour, and so Garrettson pushed on. 

Thus from 1775 till 1784 he traveled and 
preached in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Caro- 
lina, finding formalism and sin, churches 
abandoned and going to decay, and lost 
sheep, and leaving extensive circuits, vig- 
orous societies, and people who blessed God 
for sending his servant among them; aid- 
ing in a multitude of ways, more than any 
man of the times, save Asbury, to give 
character and success to the denomination 
from New Jersey to South Carolina. In 
September, 1784, when on the point of de- 
parting for this last-named State, that he 
might press the battle to the gates of the 
far South, Dr. Coke, who had been em- 
powered by Mr. Wesley to organize the 



In the Saddle 55 

American societies into an independent 
Church, arrived in America, and his com- 
ing, together with the rush of the impor- 
tant events which followed, indefinitely 
postponed his proposed expedition. When 
Coke had met Garrettson in Delaware, and 
had conferred with Asbury and other 
preachers, and it had been decided to call 
a General Conference at Baltimore, he 
wrote in his Journal : "Here I met with an 
excellent young man, Freeborn Garrettson. 
He seems all meekness and love, and yet 
all activity. He makes me quite ashamed, 
for he invariably rises at four in the morn- 
ing, and not only he but several others of 
the preachers. Him we sent off, like an 
arrow, from north to south, directing him 
to send messengers to the right and left 
and to gather all the preachers together 
at Baltimore on Christmas Eve." And this 
the appointed herald of the Christmas Con- 
ference did. "I set out for Virginia and 
Carolina," he writes, "and a tedious journey 
I had. My dear Master enabled me to ride 
about twelve hundred miles in about six 
weeks; and preach going and coming con- 
stantly. The Conference began on Christ- 
mas Day." 



CHAPTER V 



THE MISSIONARY 

The day before Christmas, 1784, there 
might have been seen riding along a road 
leading into Baltimore a cavalcade more 
interesting in some ways than Chaucer's 
Canterbury pilgrims. There was not to be 
seen such diversity of dress as shown in 
Stothard's picture of that famous English 
band of pilgrims, for this Maryland pro- 
cession was made up of soberly dressed 
Methodist preachers, who had been guests 
of Henry Dorsey Gough, a man of large 
wealth, whose home, Perry Hall, some 
twelve miles from the city, was for years 
both a preaching place and haven of rest 
for the itinerants. These were serious men 
who were riding that day from Perry Hall 
into Baltimore, for they were about to en- 
gage in the most important conference of 
Methodist preachers ever held in America; 
confident of divine guidance, for hitherto 
had Jehovah helped them; audacious be- 
cause a continent now free stretched out be- 
fore them to be taken for Christ. At ten 
o'clock the next morning the first session 
56 



The Missionary 57 

of the famous Christmas Conference as- 
sembled. Coke, as Wesley's representative, 
was in the chair. Of a total of eighty or 
more preachers nearly sixty were present, 
and of these we know the names of twenty- 
nine. 

Beyond question the most conspicuous 
figure was Francis Asbury, who had been 
picked by Wesley for the general superin- 
tendency, but there were other men present 
equally worthy of notice, as, for instance, 
Whatcoat and Vasey, recently arrived in 
America, accredited messengers of Wesley; 
Reuben Ellis, "an excellent counselor and 
steady yokefellow in Jesus"; Edward 
Dromgoole, an Irishman and a converted 
Romanist; John Haggerty, a trophy of 
John King's zeal, and who could preach 
both in English and in German; William 
Gill, pronounced by Dr. Benjamin Rush, 
the eminent physician, "the greatest divine 
he had ever heard"; Thomas Ware, after- 
ward the founder of the denomination in 
New Jersey, and a successful preacher for 
a half century; Francis Poythress, who the 
year previous had borne the standard across 
the Alleghanies; Joseph Everett, "the 
roughest-spoken preacher that ever stood 
in the itinerant ranks"; Le Roy Cole, who 



58 Freeborn Garrettson 



was to live long, preach much, and do mucH 
good; William Glendenning, an erratic 
Scotchman; Nelson Reed, small of stature 
but mighty in spirit; James O'Kelly, then 
a most laborious and popular evangelist 
but later a rebellious controversialist; John 
Dickins, one of the ablest scholars of early 
Methodism; William Black, the first apostle 
to Nova Scotia, who had come to plead for 
helpers ; Caleb Boyer and Ignatius Pigman, 
the former the Saint Paul and the latter 
the Apollos of the denomination; Jonathan 
Forrest, who was to be privileged to see 
the Church, which in this historic assembly 
he helped to found, increase from about 
15,000 members to 1,000,000, and from 
80 or more traveling preachers to over 
4,000 ; and Freeborn Garrettson, tall, broad- 
shouldered, high-browed, grave but with 
a kindly smile, serene and self-poised, and 
as worthy as any of these named or any of 
the others present to sit in this first great 
Conference of the Church. 

It is not within the scope of my purpose 
to tell of the momentous work of this Con- 
ference beyond indicating somewhat of its 
significance to Garrettson, and as denoting 
his right to be counted among the makers of 
our Methodism. After a great battle in 



The Missionary 59 



which the carnage had been fearful and the 
valor and heroism of the soldiers were sub- 
lime, the victorious commander presented 
to the survivors a medal with the name of 
the battle and the simple inscription, "I was 
there." Freeborn Garrettson was present 
when the Methodist Episcopal Church was 
organized, its name determined upon, its 
first bishops consecrated, and where he 
himself was ordained an elder, and was 
likewise present at practically every im- 
portant gathering in the interests of the 
Church from that notable day until his 

i death in 1827. 

It has been said that the itinerancy as 
organized at the Christmas Conference was 

1 a great missionary system, and this is true. 
But Methodism from the beginning was 
missionary in spirit. Others besides its 
great founder felt that the world was 
Methodism's parish. How else can the 
coming of Boardman, Pilmoor, Rankin, 
Shadford, Asbury, and others to these far- 
away shores be explained ? George White- 
field crossed the Atlantic thirteen times. 
Thomas Coke sailed almost every sea, and 
was buried in the Indian Ocean. The sense 
of responsibility and the faith of those 
Methodist pioneers knew neither barriers 



60 Freeborn Garrettson 



nor limitations. Their field was the world. 
Christ had died for all men. How absurd 
would have sounded to them any talk about 
a "home field" or a "foreign field" ! In 
their Bible they read only world-state- 
ments — "God so loved the world," "Go ye 
into all the world" ; and to them, as it must 
be to us, the missionary appeal was a world- 
appeal. Whoever lifts an honest voice in 
Christ's name in whatever place stands at 
the center. With those early Methodist 
preachers it was not so much where they 
labored as how successfully. They were 
men who were willing to work anywhere, 
if they could help along the kingdom. So 
when John Wesley in the Leeds Conference 
in 1769 said, "We have a pressing call from 
our brethren at New York; who is willing 
to go?" he was not required to repeat the 
question. 

It was very natural, therefore, that at the 
Christmas Conference the eyes of those 
missionary preachers should be upon the 
far horizons, and that when William Black, 
a Yorkshireman, through whose efforts in 
1780 Methodism had been started in Nova 
Scotia, told of the prosperity of Zion in that 
land of snow and frost, and declared he 
must have help, the Conference was sympa- 



The Missionary 



61 



thetic with his plea and appointed Freeborn 
Garrettson and James O. Cromwell to that 
growing work. These men received their 
appointment with unfeigned joy, and em- 
barked about the middle of February, 1785. 
They reached Halifax after a stormy 
voyage of two weeks, found some "true 
friends of the gospel," one of whom hired 
a house for public worship, and within a 
week Garrettson had formed a society, con- 
sisting of six or seven members. Crom- 
well soon went to Shelburne, Garrettson 
remaining at Halifax, but with the idea of 
making a tour through the country later. 
He remained in this difficult field for two 
years, in constant peril from the difficulties 
and dangers of an unsettled country and 
from the severities of the weather. Joshua 
Marsden, of the Wesleyan Conference, 
who went to Nova Scotia in 1800, in his 
"Narrative" of the mission says: "Those 
who are accustomed only to the cold of 
England cannot conceive of the intense! 
severity of the winters in Nova Scotia; the 
snow is often from four to six feet deep; 
the ice upon the rivers is two feet thick ; the 
cold penetrates the warmest rooms, the 
warmest clothes, and will render torpid the 
warmest constitutions; it often freezes to 



62 Freeborn Garrettson 

death those who lose their way in the woods, ; 
or get bewildered in the thick and blinding 
fury of a snowdrift." But perils and dis- 
comforts were the common lot of the Metho- 
dist itinerants, and they were never daunted 
by them. Garrettson had a rough time in - 
Nova Scotia, once nearly losing his life in a \ 
snowstorm, and again in crossing a swollen i 
river. What a striking account of this period |i 
this is : "After visiting the cities and towns 
and traversing the mountains and valleys, ! 
frequently on foot, with a knapsack to my 
back, up Indian paths in the wilderness 
where it was not expedient to take a horse, 
and having frequently to wade through 
morasses leg-deep in mud and water, and 
having frequently to satisfy hunger with a 
piece of bread and pork from my knapsack, 
and to quench my thirst from the brook, 
and to rest my weary limbs in a solitary 
wilderness on the leaves of the trees, I may 
truly say I went forth weeping, but thank 
God he was with me, and in every place his 
power was felt, and I may say souls were 
awakened and converted to God, and 
though I had to depend upon my private 
funds for clothing and traveling expenses, 
under my views of the prosperity of Zion 
I felt myself amply compensated for all my 



The Missionary 63 

| toil and never for a moment regretted the 
1 hardship of my lot in that cold, wild coun- 
try." He returned to the United States in 
the spring of 1787 by direction of Mr. 
Wesley, leaving a small Conference of 
preachers and some six hundred members, 
all of whom were attached to him and de- 
sired his return. There is a pathetic touch 
in the closing sentence of his Journal of 
his missionary life in this barren land : "My 
little funds were so reduced I had to sell 
part of my little traveling library, and after 
all when I came to my native place I had 
but one guinea left." Buckley, in his His- 
tory of Methodism, says that "Garrettson's 
influence in Nova Scotia was almost equal 
to that of Wesley in Europe and Asbury 
in the United States"; and the influence of 
these years in the mission field of Nova 
Scotia upon himself was quite as pro- 
nounced. All through his long life he dis- 
played the spirit of a missionary, and one 
of the last acts of his life was to make a 
bequest, the income of which would be suf- 
ficient to support a single missionary, as he 
expressed it, until the millennium. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE NEW YORK CONFERENCE 

While Garrettson must ever be regarded 
as one of the guiding and molding person- 
alities in giving a formative character to 
American Methodism in general, he was in 
a large and peculiar sense the founder of 
Methodism in the region extending north- 
ward from New York city, even as far as 
Canada, and continued the conspicuous 
representative of that whole territory for 
thirty years. The story of how he came 
to lead the hosts of God in this particular 
part of the field of battle glows with 
romance and abounds with indications of 
the divine purpose. 

We have just seen how he left Nova 
Scotia at the bidding of Mr. Wesley, who 
had a high opinion of the young missionary 
and held him in much affection. His letters 
to him read like those of Paul to Timothy, 
and Garrettson in his replies signed himself 
"Your affectionate though unworthy son." 
It was Mr. Wesley's wish that Garrettson 
should be made the superintendent, or 
bishop, of the Methodist societies in the 
64 



The New York Conference 65 

British dominions in America, and through 
Dr. Coke intimated his desire to the Con- 
ference held in Baltimore in May, 1787, 
and at which Garrettson was present. The 
proposal was apparently received with 
warm approval by the members of the Con- 
ference. Garrettson, when asked by Bishop 
Coke if he would accept the appointment, 
replied that he would upon certain con- 
ditions, namely, that he would visit the 
lands in question, and if cordially received 
would return to the next Conference for 
ordination to the office of superintendent. 
Whereupon Coke gave him a commenda- 
tory letter to the brethren in the West 
Indies, and Garrettson made his plans to 
start as soon as the Conference adjourned. 
He was absent from the Conference for a 
time, and during his absence something 
happened, for when the appointments were 
read, to his utter bewilderment he found 
himself presiding elder of the work in the 
Peninsula, the scene of his earlier labors. 

What happened or why will probably 
never be known; it is one of the mysteries 
of our denominational history. The change 
in the mind of the Conference created much 
discussion at the time, but the reason for 
it was never given. Bangs attempts a solu- 



66 Freeborn Garrettson 



tion in this fashion: ''Probably knowing the 
value of his services in the Lord's vine- 
yard, and being comparatively young as a 
Church, they were unwilling to have him 
so entirely separated from them." That 
may have been the reason, but I am in- 
clined to believe as being more probable 
that they refused the appointment because 
Wesley and Coke both desired it. That 
Conference was not cordially sympathetic 
with the expressed wishes of Wesley and 
Coke; it was even hostile at times. Most 
of the members were out of sorts with Dr. 
Coke for what they regarded as his "ar- 
bitrariness," and because of his propensity, 
as some thought, to stir up strife among 
the preachers. Lee, our first Methodist 
historian, says, "The Doctor saw that the 
preachers were pretty generally united 
against him, acknowledged his faults, 
begged pardon, and promised not to med- 
dle with [their] affairs again when out of 
the United States." 

There was also discussion, at times bit- 
ter, at this Conference, as to the relations 
of the American Methodists to Wesley, the 
outcome of w r hich gave him great offense. 
He wanted Whatcoat to be made joint 
superintendent with Asbury, but the 



The New York Conference 67 

preachers would have none of it and 
voted against it. It would seem as if those 
preachers were in no mood to support any- 
thing which either he or Dr. Coke pro- 
posed. They were friendly to Garrettson, 
but unfriendly to his sponsors. Garrettson 
was confessedly disappointed and annoyed, 
but in later years he must have blessed God 
many, many times that the Conference 
took the action which it did. How often 
it transpires that our greatest happiness 
is to be found in the shadow of our 
most grievous disappointments ! Had he 
gone to the West Indies, in all human prob- 
abilities he never would have met, as he 
did a short time later, the gracious woman 
who in 1793 became his wife, and there- 
after was his companion and helpmeet in 
the highest sense. Nor would he likely 
have been assigned to the work which 
yielded the largest returns of his entire 
ministry, and with which his name will 
always be associated. 

It all came about in this way : After hav- 
ing spent three months in the Peninsula, 
at the particular request of Bishop Asbury 
Garrettson set out for Boston to open the 
work in that region, and it was by the 
merest chance that not he but Jesse Lee 



68 Freeborn Garrettson 



became the Apostle to New England. 
When on his journey he reached New 
York he found John Dickins in poor 
health, and Woolman Hickson, the other 
stationed preacher there, at the point of 
death. The situation was so critical that 
he consented to remain and take charge of 
the society until Conference, which met 
that year in Old John Street Church, being 
the first to be held in New York. It was 
an important session. There were urgent 
requests for preachers for many new 
places. It providentially happened that 
"many young itinerants, stalwart, and 
flaming with the zeal of the gospel, had 
appeared in the field about New York," 
and at the request of Bishop Asbury Gar- 
rettson was asked to take charge of the 
band and "to extend the march of the 
Church up the Hudson." This appoint- 
ment made Garrettson "very uneasy in 
mind," and he prayed for direction. God 
answered him in a dream. It was a won- 
derful vision. "It seemed," he says, "as 
if the whole country up the North River, 
east and west, even as far as Lake Cham- 
plain, was laid open to my view. The next 
day I requested the young men to meet 
me, and I told each of them where to begin 



The New York Conference 69 



and the way they were to go in forming 
their circuits, and I told them that I should 
go on to the extreme parts of the work, 
visiting the towns and cities, and on my 
return I should visit them and hold their 
quarterly meetings, and I had such a strong 
confidence in God that there would be a 
work that I appointed a time for each 
quarterly meeting and requested the 
preachers to take a public collection at 
every place where they preached. Ac- 
cordingly, on my return I found my expec- 
tations fully answered, for the Lord was 
with the young men and began a glorious 
work, and their little salary was nearly 
made up at the first quarterly meetings, 
and before winter set in they all had com- 
fortable circuits." The members of this 
glorious company of intrepid and success- 
ful pioneers were Peter Moriarty, who of- 
ficiated at Garrettson's wedding, six years 
later; Albert Van Nostrand, Andrew Har- 
pending, Cornelius Cooke, whose last will 
and testament, by which he committed his 
son to the care of Bishop Asbury to be 
educated at Cokesbury College, with funds 
for the purpose, is in my possession ; Sam- 
uel J. Talbot, Darius Dunham, David Ken- 
dall, Lemuel Smith, and Samuel Wigton. 



70 Freeborn Garrettson 



As was to be expected, their energetic 
heralding of the gospel provoked discussion 
and started vague rumors. One startled 
man said: "I know not from whence they 
come, unless from the clouds." Others 
said, "They seem to be good men" ; still 
others, "Nay, they are deceivers of the 
people." Garrettson fell in with a traveler 
who had come from beyond Lake Cham- 
plain, where he had seen several of the 
preachers, and who excitedly told him the 
current report, that "the king of England 
had sent to this country a great many min- 
isters to disaffect the people and bring 
about another war" — a result likely to fol- 
low because of the unparalleled activity of 
these preacher-agents of England ! Gar- 
rettson was able, fortunately, to ease the 
man's mind, who after the conversation 
"seemed satisfied and much affected." Nor 
was it without personal peril that Garrett- 
son pushed the battle, but as in other fields 
of labor nothing unnerved him, and nothing 
hindered the resistless onward march of 
the Church under his superb leadership. 
He was preeminently a leader, with gifts 
for oversight, administration, and inspira- 
tion, and no diocesan bishop ever wielded 
greater authority or carried forward enter- 



The New York Conference 71 

prises to a larger success than did this 
episcopos of the Hudson River Valley. 
Coke in his Journal in 1789 says: "In the 
country parts of this State, Freeborn Gar- 
rettson, one of our presiding elders, has 
been greatly blessed and is endued with an 
uncommon talent for opening new places. 
With a set of inexperienced but zealous 
youths he has not only carried our work in 
this State as high as Lake Champlain, but 
has raised congregations in most of the 
States of New England and also in the 
little State of Vermont within about one 
hundred miles of Montreal. " He traveled 
between five and six thousand miles a year 
through a large part of New York State, 
parts of Connecticut and Vermont, and 
even to Boston and Rhode Island. His 
New York District extended from New 
Rochelle to Lake Champlain, and from the 
Eastern States westward to Utica, then 
quite a new and unsettled country, and it 
was his practice to go round this district, 
about a thousand miles, once every three 
months, preach upward of a hundred ser- 
mons, then return to New York, where he 
usually remained about two weeks. In 
three years there were more than three 
thousand members, — twelve circuits, em- 



72 Freeborn Garrettson 



bracing nearly all the territory now in- 
cluded in the New York and Troy Con- 
ferences, having been formed. In 1789 one 
of his preachers on the Newburgh Circuit 
pushed southwest into the Wyoming Val- 
ley, which was soon added to the list of 
regular appointments. In 1793 Garrettson 
was appointed to the Philadelphia District, 
but the next year he was returned as Pre- 
siding Elder on the Dutchess District, and 
settled at Rhinebeck, and ever after, for 
more than thirty years, although he made 
frequent excursions to the South and East 
and to other parts of the country, his chief 
labors were within bounds of the New 
York Conference, a Conference which has 
had a notable history from its organization 
to the present time. Garrettson preached 
in nearly every charge within its bounds, 
was presiding elder of various districts 
many times, and more than once was ap- 
pointed Conference missionary, an appoint- 
ment designed to give him an opportunity 
to travel at large, blessing all the societies 
with the quickening influences of his wide 
knowledge of denominational affairs and 
his rich experiences of grace in Jesus Christ. 
He was an itinerant to the end of his life. 
When he had come to his life's evening he 



The New York Conference 73 



said with much feeling, "I have been an 
itinerant now fifty-two years, and were 
I called back fifty years I would cheerfully 
retrace them in so glorious a cause in pref- 
erence to sitting on a splendid earthly 
throne." It is to such self-denying devo- 
tion, to such fixedness of purpose, to such 
apostolic zeal, to such indifference to suf- 
fering, and to such glad-hearted willing- 
ness to make the greatest sacrifices for the 
gospel's sake that we are indebted for the 
establishment of our Methodism, its spirit, 
its development, and its progress within 
the bounds of the New York Conference 
and throughout the United States and the 
world. What trumpet-tongued voices these 
are which so mightily speak to us from the 
glorious past! 

"You spring from men whose hearts and lives are 
pure; 

Their aim was steadfast, as their purpose sure : 
So live that children's children, in their day, 
May bless such fathers' fathers as they pray." 



CHAPTER VII 



THE HOME ON THE HUDSON 

A stranger, meeting Bishop Asbury on 
the prairies of Ohio, asked him abruptly, 
"Where are you from?" Asbury replied, 
"From Boston, New York, Philadelphia, 
Baltimore, or almost any place you please." 
This was literally true ; he was a man with- 
out a home. Not so Freeborn Garrettson. 
To him it was given to have one of the 
most beautiful and far-famed of early 
Methodism's conspicuous homes, of which 
there were not a few. Who does not know 
of Perry Hall, the country home of Henry 
Dorsey Gough, of which mention has al- 
ready been made, said to have been one of 
the most elegant country residences in 
America at the time, or of the spacious 
mansion of Governor Van Cortlandt, the 
first lieutenant-governor of New York 
State, and elected eighteen times to that 
same office — that hearty Methodist whose 
influence helped Methodism throughout the 
State, or of Richard Bassett's in Delaware, 
or of General Russell's, whose wife was a 
74 



The Home on the Hudson 75 



sister of Patrick Henry, on the West Vir- 
ginia Heights, or of Governor Tiffin's in 
Ohio, all "God's chosen cities of refuge 
for the Methodist itinerants'' ? Garrettson's 
home would compare favorably with any 
of these named, both as to location and 
ampleness, and in no one of them was a 
more gracious hospitality shown. 

This home, which was called Wildercliffe, 
was situated on the east bank of the Hud- 
son River at Rhinebeck, about three miles 
from the village, on high ground which 
commanded a fine view to the west and to 
the south. Asbury, who often visited the 
place, and who called it "Traveler's Rest" 
— Boehm, his traveling companion, says, 
"The bishop delighted to visit that model 
household" — speaks of the "good, simply 
elegant, useful house" with its "beautiful 
land and water prospect." The chief 
feature in the landscape was the noble 
Hudson, the house being near enough to 
the river to give the impression that the 
river was a part of the place. To the south 
the view stretched forty miles away to the 
Highlands at West Point, and westward 
across the river and the woodlands and 
waving fields on the opposite bank, up the 
slopes of the low-lying hills beyond, and on 



76 Freeborn Garrettson 



to the blue Catskilis. The outlook was 
grandly beautiful, and we can easily enter, 
in some measure at least, into Garrettson' s 
feelings as in the last years of his life he 
was wont to seat himself in his chair be- 
neath the trees and praise God audibly and 
with tears as he gazed on the enchanting 
prospect. In tranquil beauty the spot could 
scarcely be surpassed. Not long before his 
death Bishop Janes wrote to Miss Garrett- 
son: "I doubt not you enjoy as keenly as 
ever the remarkable and almost redundant 
natural beauties with which your heavenly 
Father has surrounded you. Though your 
eye may become dim they will never fade 
from your mind." 

But more remarkable even than the 
"natural beauties'' of the place was the at- 
mosphere of the home. Dr. Bangs relates 
a conversation with a Presbyterian woman 
of New York, who was intimate with Mrs. 
Garrettson, and who after a visit to the 
family at Rhinebeck expressed her admira- 
tion for the order which prevailed there. 
"I do not mean," she said, "the order of the 
farm or of the house, but I mean the re- 
ligious order which prevails throughout 
every department; the orderly arrangement 
for family devotions, and the orderly man- 



The Home on the Hudson 77 

ner in which the servants and all attached 
to the household attend to their religious 
as well as to their other duties. " And who 
was responsible for all this? Garrettson? 
Yes, in part. But Garrettson, like Asbury, 
was to the end of his days a wanderer over 
the face of the earth. Most of the early 
preachers when they married located, but 
not Garrettson. If ever a Methodist itin- 
erant had social allurements or a home 
of luxurious ease to draw him out of the 
ranks of the traveling preachers it was he. 
But his sense of obligation was far too 
strong to permit him to cease traveling, even 
though he was most happily married and 
had an unusually comfortable home. Had 
he been inclined to locate it is more than 
doubtful if Mrs. Garrettson would have 
encouraged him in it. Some two years after 
their marriage she wrote in one of her 
letters to him: "I hope, my dear, you will 
find your soul more than ever engaged in 
the work of the Lord, and that you will 
improve every opportunity to bring glory 
to God. Keep ever in view the importance 
of every living soul you meet with, and let 
none pass without a word in season; 'tis 
expected from you and God has laid it on 
you. I despair of ever being a shining 



78 Freeborn Garrettson 



light ; but I would wish to see you the most 
pious man in the world/' 

No sketch of Freeborn Garrettson can be 
written without more than a passing notice 
of this remarkable woman, who, though she 
did despair of being a shining light, was 
foeyond question, for more than a half 
■century, the most notable woman of Amer- 
ican Methodism. Lady Huntingdon did not 
wield a more beneficent influence in Eng- 
land than Catharine Livingston Garrettson 
did in America. In the first place, she was 
well born. Her father was Judge Robert 
R. Livingston, the head of a family of great 
distinction and of historical importance. 
The Livingston family, it is stated, was the 
wealthiest family in New York State, as 
well as one of the most honored in the 
American Colonies. Judge Livingston was 
a man of the highest character. Chief 
Justice Smith, who knew him well, was 
wont to say that were he banished to some 
lonely isle, and given the choice of one book 
and one friend, the book would be the 
Bible and the friend Robert R. Living- 
ston. Catharine Livingston's mother was 
Margaret Beekman, the daughter of Colonel 
Henry Beekman, one of the first settlers 
and largest landholders of Rhinebeck, a 



The Home on the Hudson 79 



descendant of William Beekman, who was 
governor of what is now the State of Dela- 
ware under a commission from Sweden, 
and, like Judge Livingston, of the best line- 
age of the Colonies, and who helped to 
create its highest social life. The Living- 
ston home was at Clermont, a name which 
will forever be associated with Robert Ful- 
ton's conquest of the Hudson River, having 
been given to the first steamboat which he 
proudly navigated up the river, in honor 
of Chancellor Livingston, the distinguished 
son of Judge Livingston, and who was as- 
sociated with Fulton in the enterprise. 
There Saturday, October 14, 1752, Cath- 
arine, the sixth child of the family, was 
born. It will be recalled that Freeborn 
Garrettson was born August 15 of this 
same year, and was therefore only two 
months her senior. 

Catharine Livingston had every reason 
to be proud of her ancestry and of her re- 
lationships. She often spoke of one of her 
ancestors, John Livingston, a noted Presby- 
terian preacher of Scotland, a zealous Cov- 
enanter, twice suspended from his pastoral 
office because of his opposition to the gov- 
ernment, and finally exiled in 1663. This 
was the Livingston who, when he was but 



80 Freeborn Garrettson 



twenty-seven years old, preached a sermon 
at Shotts which will live forever in the an- 
nals of great religious quickenings, some 
five hundred people being converted through 
that one discourse. She was equally proud 
of her immediate relatives. Her eldest 
brother, Robert Livingston, was one of the 
committee of five who framed the Declara- 
tion of Independence, became the first 
Chancellor of the State of New York and 
administered the oath of office to Washing- 
ton when inaugurated as President of the 
United States, who later appointed him Sec- 
retary of Foreign Affairs and Minister to 
France. Her youngest brother, Edward 
Livingston, was Mayor of New York, Sen- 
ator from Louisiana, Secretary of State 
under President Jackson, and Minister to 
France. He wrote the Penal Code of Lou- 
isiana, a document so humane that Russia 
and Sweden bestowed honors upon its 
author. It is said of him that no American 
ever stood higher abroad than this states- 
man whose beneficent spirit embodied in 
law is the admiration of all ages, and that 
a distinguished German professor when in- 
troduced to him called him "the world's 
benefactor." 

Catharine Livingston had five sisters, 



The Home on the Hudson 81 

beautiful women of wit and more than 
ordinary talent. One of them, the eldest, 
married General Richard Montgomery, who 
fell at the storming of Quebec in 1775, two 
years after their marriage, "and the blow 
that made his wife a widow sent a thrill 
of sorrow through the whole land ; even his 
foes wept over his bier and the governor 
of Quebec buried him with military honors." 
Another sister was the wife of General 
James Armstrong of the Revolutionary 
army. Judge Livingston was a patriot 
among patriots, and his home was a center 
of deep patriotic interest, where public 
movements were noted and discussed and 
no small sacrifices were made. It is not 
surprising that his children partook of his 
spirit. 

Still another sister married Dr. Thomas 
Tillotson, of Rhinebeck, and it was in their 
home that Catharine Livingston first met 
Freeborn Garrettson. The story of this 
meeting is one of the most romantic inci- 
dents in Garrettson's career. Miss Liv- 
ingston had already made the acquaintance 
of the Methodists, a devoted servant in the 
household at Clermont, who had joined the 
infant Methodist Church in New York, 
being instrumental in bringing about her 



82 Freeborn Garrettson 



conversion. It is difficult at this distance 
of time to realize all that this decision to 
cast in her lot with the Methodists involved 
or cost her. She moved in the highest 
ranks of society, was a correspondent of 
most of the distinguished women of her 
day, enjoyed the personal acquaintance of 
President Washington, and while after her 
conversion she carefully avoided every ap- 
pearance of evil, it is said that even late in 
her prolonged life she could hardly help 
showing some chagrin when mentioning the 
fact that she had declined an invitation 
from him to dance with him at a party, the 
reason at the time, however, being not one 
of conscience but the fact that she had 
engaged herself to another partner. Her 
religious decision required courage, firm- 
ness of purpose, and indifference to the 
speculations and banter of her friends. 
The change which she made was a radical 
one, and soon excited comment and even 
some objections. Her own family were 
more or less embarrassed and perplexed. 
Edward Eggleston is responsible for the 
story that after her conversion one of 
her brothers, seeing the joyousness of 
his favorite sister's Christian life at home, 
took her part in the family, but at the same 



The Home on the Hudson 83 



time said to her, "Catharine, enjoy your re- 
ligion here at home all you please, but for 
heaven's sake don't join those Methodists; 
why, down at the ferry, nobody belongs to 
them and there is nothing of them only 
three fishermen and a negro/' Whereupon 
the sister, "one of the fairest flowers of 
our colonial life," blushed and spoke with 
much resolution: "Well, what if, as you 
say, now nobody belongs to the Methodists ; 
I will join them and then you will say some- 
body does." This story probably has a 
real basis of fact in the suggestion of her 
brother-in-law, Dr. Tillotson, who, when 
a class was to be formed in Rhinebeck, 
urged Miss Livingston, inasmuch as there 
was only one other who desired to join, 
one Jeremiah Van Auken, "to wait until 
there were more members/' to which ad- 
vice she gave this characteristic reply: "I 
join, Mr. Tillotson, that there may be 
more." 

It was just before this incident that 
Freeborn Garrettson, then scarcely thirty- 
five years of age, but a veteran in the serv- 
ice, appointed to labor in the State of New 
York with numerous young preachers whom 
he was to superintend, making his first 
journey northward, traveling by land and 



84 Freeborn Garrettson 



preaching wherever an opening might be 
made, reached Poughkeepsie, where he re- 
mained several days. While there he re- 
ceived a note from Dr. Tillotson, who was 
himself from Maryland and had heard 
much of Garrettson in his native State, in- 
viting him to his house at Rhinebeck. The 
invitation was accepted and, accompanied 
by one of his young preachers, he went to 
Rhinebeck, where a most gratifying wel- 
come was given them. Wakeley, in his 
"Lost Chapters Recovered, ,, says that it was 
in New York at the house of John Staples 
that Garrettson first saw Miss Livingston; 
but he is in error, for on the written state- 
ment of Miss Garrettson the first meeting 
took place at this time. Often in later 
years Mrs. Garrettson described the visit. 
Mr. Garrettson preached several times dur- 
ing the few days he spent at Dr. Tillotson's 
to increasing congregations, and when he 
departed, Rhinebeck had been added to the 
circuit then forming. When he left he car- 
ried with him letters of introduction to Mrs. 
Livingston at Clermont, which was his 
first stop on his journey up the river. His 
coming to Clermont made a profound 
sensation. At the breakfast table that 
morning Mrs. Livingston recited a text 



The Home on the Hudson 85 



which had been deeply impressed on her 
mind during the night, "This day is sal- 
vation come to thine house/' and when in 
the course of the day a stranger unex- 
pectedly came they remembered. His holy 
bearing, devout conversation, and earnest 
prayers were truly felt in the family, who 
were often affected to tears. "He need 
not change his form to be an angel," said 
one of them. "O," said another who lived 
at a little distance, "when you have prayers, 
please send for me." 

But while they were strangely moved by 
his conversation and the religious services 
which he held on the occasion of that visit, 
when subsequently it became known that he 
was interested in Miss Livingston, opposi- 
tion to their marriage developed which oc- 
casioned both of them much sorrow. Their 
correspondence during this period, and 
indeed throughout their entire married 
life — hundreds of their letters are pre- 
served at Drew Theological Seminary — 
is singularly beautiful. Not infrequently 
before their marriage she refers to the "sit- 
uation" which, she felt, "called for grace 
and wisdom," in such passages as these: 
"They all continue with respect to tem- 
porals as when you left. No one seems 



86 Freeborn Garrettson 



inclined to speak to me, and I feel not the 
least freedom to begin the subject. . . . 
I am happy [though], and nothing does 
offend me." "I received your letter and 
was pleased to find that you had taken the 
resolution of going to Clermont. By the 
time you read this the result of your con- 
ference will be determined. I have great 
hopes you will be kindly received. Should 
it be otherwise I should have great need 
of uncommon support. There is nothing 
gives me more disquietude than that of not 
being permitted to receive your visits. My 
situation is on that account more painful 
than I can tell you, and throws an embar- 
rassment over me that I can by no means 
conquer, and shall never be reconciled to. 
Tis this that led me to press you to once 
more see my brother." 

During the period when Garrettson was 
forbidden to come to Clermont they met at 
Miss Livingston's sister's house, but neither 
of them liked the idea of meeting thus clan- 
destinely. It was her mother who was 
most opposed. One of her sisters assured 
Miss Livingston that her happiness was 
dear to most of her brothers and sisters, 
and that what opposition any of them might 
feel would disappear if only her mother 



The Home on the Hudson 87 

could be prevailed upon. This opposition, 
while not violent, was disquieting and an- 
noying. Mrs. Livingston was not favora- 
ble to her daughter's going to the quarterly 
meetings which Mr. Garrettson held, and 
while she did not forbid it would not give 
her the money necessary for the journey. 
Later Miss Livingston came into some 
property, and it was evidently their purpose 
to take a house in Albany, Miss Livingston 
writing that she expected sixty pounds 
soon, and that she would get some things 
for housekeeping. "I should be grieved," 
she adds, "if you should continue to have 
any fears on my account. The luxuries of 
life I am principled against; I wish them 
not; they long since lost their power to 
please a soul that is on the wing for eter- 
nity." It would appear from the corre- 
spondence that the situation was most acute 
in 1793, when there were threats of disin- 
heritance, but the loss of property did not 
daunt her, and we find her writing such 
sentiments as these : 

"My Dearest Friend: Without know- 
ing of certain conveyance for this I sit down 
to tell you that I love you more perhaps 
than I have ever done." 

In another letter, after stating that con- 



88 Freeborn Garrettson 



ditions had not changed, she concludes 
thus : 

"Farewell, best of men; God loves, 
and let that suffice. Assured of his favor, 
what have we to fear from outward circum- 
stances however gloomy. I am my be- 
loved's and my beloved is mine." 

In April she writes from New York, 
w r here she is visiting 

"Every expression of regard from you, 
my best friend, is dear to me ; I thank you 
for them and wish myself more deserving. 
I should have written you before, but knew 
not until I heard from you where to di- 
rect. God grant us a happy meeting in the 
country. [The letter tells of her plan to 
go to visit the Tillotsons at Rhinebeck the 
following week.] Oh, when will the dark 
clouds of displeasure be dispelled? There 
must be a cause why the Lord permits this 
opposition to his will. Still love and pray 
for your affectionate 

"Catharine Livingston." 

Almost immediately after this her 
mother withdrew her opposition and gave 
her hearty consent to the marriage, and 
Catharine Livingston, as Walpole said of 
Lady Margaret Hastings's marriage with 
Ingham, "threw herself away on a Metho- 



The Home on the Hudson 89 



dist preacher." The wedding took place 
June 30, 1793, in the First Methodist Epis- 
copal Church in Rhinebeck, New York, the 
ceremony being performed by the Rev. 
Peter Moriarty, and directly after the cere- 
mony Mr. and Mrs. Garrettson partook of 
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to- 
gether. 

Berridge said that John Wesley and 
George Whitefield had only been saved 
from making a shipwreck of the cause by 
God's sending them "a pair of ferrets" for 
wives. Garrettson never ceased to bless 
God for the noble woman whom God gave 
to him. Their home life was beautiful be- 
yond words. As has been stated in another 
place, after their marriage Garrettson was 
stationed at Philadelphia, where the yellow 
fever was raging with unusual virulence, 
but Mrs. Garrettson did not hesitate to take 
the risk, and accompanied him. The spring 
following they returned to New York, 
where Garrettson purchased a farm at 
Rhinebeck, setting up housekeeping in an 
old Dutch farmhouse some miles from the 
river but near the church. This first dwell- 
ing was a humble one, suited to their narrow 
income, for since Mr. Garrettson would not 
take a salary, and since, during his first 



90 Freeborn Garrettson 



years in the itinerancy, he had suffered 
serious financial loss, though his income 
was still sufficient for his moderate wants, 
and as Mrs. Garrettson's income at this time 
was also a limited one, their experiences 
during the early years of their married 
life were more in unison with that of their 
brethren than has commonly been supposed. 
In this place they lived five years, and here 
it was that their only child, Mary Ruther- 
ford Garrettson, was born in 1794. At the 
end of this period he made an exchange 
for the place which for many years was 
to be a Methodist shrine. That year, hav- 
ing the house to build, Garrettson did not 
travel, but remained at home to look after 
its construction. They moved into it in 
October, 1799, and Mrs. Garrettson wrote 
in her diary: "The first night in family 
prayer, while my blessed husband was 
dedicating it to the Lord, the place was 
filled with His presence who in days of old 
filled the temple with His glory. Every 
heart rejoiced and felt that God was with 
us of a truth. Such was our introduction 
into our new habitation, and had we not 
cause to say with Joshua, 'As for me and 
my house we will serve the Lord'?" 
Garrettson had felt no little anxiety 



The Home on the Hudson 91 



about the propriety of building what was 
for those days an unusually fine house, but 
he made it a matter of prayer and the Lord 
gave him answers of peace. It was not 
ostentatious, but commodious and attract- 
ive. There were piazzas running around 
the house, from which one could enter the 
parlors and sitting-room through low win- 
dows. Within the house was much antique 
furniture, an ample library, many historical 
relics; the walls were adorned with family 
portraits, among them that of Chancellor 
Livingston and other members of the Liv- 
ingston family; and pictures of Garrettson 
and Asbury hung side by side. Here the 
most generous hospitality was dispensed. 
Thither came the most distinguished states- 
men, soldiers, and scholars of the time, and 
here with the grace and tact that came of 
high breeding and true goodness of heart 
Mrs. Garrettson presided. Here, too, it 
was that Garrettson was seen at his best. 
Bishop George once remarked how agreea- 
bly disappointed he had been in visiting 
Garrettson at his own house. Having only 
seen him occasionally at the General Con- 
ference, and having been under the necessity 
of differing from him on questions of ec- 
clesiastical polity, he had formed the idea 



92 Freeborn Garrettson 



that Garrettson was austere in his manners 
and somewhat bigoted in his views; "but," 
said the bishop, "when I had the happiness 
of visiting him under his own roof and of 
observing the quiet order of his household, 
the happiness of his disposition, the kind- 
ness and attention with which he treated his 
friends and visitors, all my prejudices were 
banished and I now think that the worth 
of Brother Garrettson has not been duly 
estimated." Garrettson was peculiarly at- 
tached to his brethren in the ministry, and 
the prophet's chamber of his home was 
rarely vacant. Dr. Bangs says that Gar- 
rettson never seemed so happy as when in 
the society of his brethren. To those of 
them with whom he was intimate he would 
unbosom himself without reserve. His 
house was the free resort of all who could 
visit him, and they w r ere royally enter- 
tained. To his house, his table, and his 
heart Methodist ministers always received 
a cordial welcome. Asbury, Whatcoat, 
McKendree, Waugh, Hedding, Bangs, Lee, 
Abbott, and practically every man of note 
in our Church in America, Reece, Hannah, 
Thornton, Arthur, Pope, and Rigg from 
over the sea, Nott and Potter and other 
distinguished representatives of other 



The Home on the Hudson 93 



Churches visited in this quiet Methodist 
home, and not one of the long line of wel- 
come guests ever left this hospitable man- 
sion without saying with Asbury, "I do 
believe God dwells in this house." 

Mrs. Garrettson's solicitude for the itin- 
erants was genuinely tender and altogether 
practical. "If any of our brethren should 
want linen," she wrote Mr. Garrettson, 
"send me the measure of the wrist and 
collar. I have a remnant of linen which 
will make two shirts and treasure an in- 
clination to serve them." Her ministries 
to her husband during his frequent and 
protracted absences from home were con- 
stant. "I send you the Digester, a tea- 
kettle, carpet, some butter, and a pot of 
currant jelly," she writes. Again, "You 
often complain of colds; I wish you would 
wear a flannel waistcoat next your skin; 
this would effectually prevent it." She 
possessed great personal dignity, and to 
the end of her days gave no evidence of 
abatement of intellectual vigor. Even in 
extreme age she continued to manifest a 
lively interest in ecclesiastical and political 
events with a fine perception of their ulti- 
mate results, and with an eye ever fixed upon 
their moral and religious bearings. With 



94 Freeborn Garrettson 



warm friendships among her kindred, and 
constant intercourse with the circle of 
wealth and political influence to which her 
family position attached her, and with the 
utmost refinement which the best social 
culture could impart, she aspired chiefly 
for holier sympathies and gloried most of 
all in counting herself a fellow citizen with 
the saints and of the household of God. 
She died in 1849, an d Dr. Olin, then presi- 
dent of Wesleyan University, could say 
without exaggeration in the sermon which 
he preached at her funeral, "I have not 
known another Christian at once so humble 
and prayerful and withal so fearless and 
confident. ,, For more than thirty years 
after Mrs. Garrettson's death the same gen- 
erous hospitality was dispensed at Wilder- 
cliffe by Miss Garrettson, who possessed a 
mind of vigor and versatility, was a lover of 
books and nature, had a brilliant imagina- 
tion, and was a writer of considerable merit. 
In the later years her wonderful memory 
and rare descriptive gifts enabled her to 
picture with ease the historic days with 
which her parents were so conspicuously 
identified. She died in 1879. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE PREACHER AND TEACHER 

Jesse Lee, who felt aggrieved that a 
notice of the Christmas Conference failed 
to reach him, says in his quaint way that 
Freeborn Garrettson undertook to travel to 
the South, but "being fond of preaching 
by the way" he failed to give timely notice to 
those preachers who were in the extremi- 
ties of the work, and that for this reason 
they were not present. Garrettson surely 
did love to preach. He was not always a 
popular preacher, especially in the early 
years, because of his conscientious scruples 
against war and of his attitude toward 
slavery, but he preached his conviction al- 
ways, being resolved, as he said, "to be 
found in my duty and to keep back no 
part of the counsel of God," no matter 
what happened to him personally. Nor was 
he without his faults as a public speaker. 
His voice was unmusical and harsh, and 
usually keyed too high. This was so preju- 
dicial to his success that before their mar- 
riage Mrs. Garrettson wrote to him : "May 
I again presume in the name of a sister to 
95 



96 Freeborn Garrettson 



mention what I think is a fault in your 
speaking? When you are earnest you lose 
the natural tone of your voice. Everything 
that is unnatural seems to give pain. I al- 
ways think you hurt yourself by the exer- 
tions you then make, and have no doubt 
but you do ; though you may not be sensible 
of it at the time. The effect on your audi- 
ence is disagreeable. It appears like anger. 
Speak strong words, they are proper, they 
are often necessary, but let it be in your 
own tone of voice, which is soft and per- 
suasive." 

But while Garrettson had little fame as 
an orator, he was mighty as a preacher, 
judged by the effects produced and the re- 
sults. And this must always be the final 
test of sermons: Do they accomplish their 
purpose? Garrettson was not a scholarly 
man. He made no pretensions to accurate 
scholarship. Sometimes it might seem that 
he was even hostile to an educated ministry, 
as, for instance, when speaking of primi- 
tive Methodist usages and how candidates 
were received into the ministry, he said : "I 
do not ask how many languages he under- 
stands or whether he can solve the prob- 
lems of Euclid. Bunyan and Abbott had 
very little learning, but the power of God 



The Preacher and Teacher 97 



accompanied them. Knowing how to navi- 
gate a ship or solve the most difficult ques- 
tion in algebra has very little to do with the 
cure of souls." That was the great thing 
with him, "the cure of souls"; and his 
preaching and his labors were all to that 
end. "It gives me much more pleasure to 
be a means of bringing sinners to Christ 
than to be thought a great preacher," he 
says. Yet what a preacher he was ! As- 
bury in his Journal tells of "a great church- 
man, who after hearing Garrettson a second 
time was seized with conviction on his way 
home and fell down in the road and stayed 
a great part of the night crying to God for 
mercy. It was suggested to him that his 
house was on fire; his answer was, 'It is 
better for me to lose my house than my 
soul.' " Garrettson's converts were numbered 
by the thousands. "It may fairly be ques- 
tioned whether any one minister in the 
Methodist Episcopal Church, or indeed any 
other Church during the same period, has 
been instrumental in the awakening and 
conversion of more sinners than he ;" — this 
was Bangs's conclusion. His fidelity in soul- 
winning was so great as to gain the ap- 
proval of the incomparable Asbury, who 
records that Garrettson talked to the land- 



98 Freeborn Garrettson 



lord of a certain tavern on the subject of 
religion, and prayed with him at night and 
in the morning, though the man would not 
consent to call his family together. Asbury 
adds this comment: "Brother Garrettson 
will let no person escape a religious lecture 
that comes in his way. Sure he is faithful, 
but what am I?" 

Dr. Neale, the translator of so many of 
the beautiful hymns of the Eastern Church, 
once told of having seen in an English 
country church, in the rector's pew, a paper 
which looked like a placard but which on 
investigation proved to be a sermon headed 
"On the vanity and uncertainty of human 
life," and labeled "in case of an accident." 
He didn't propose to be sermonless if by 
any chance he should forget his discourse 
and leave it at home. The subject of the 
sermon held in reserve was always timely. 
Garrettson, though he did say when he 
first began to preach that his Bible at cer- 
tain times seemed so small that he could 
not find a text, was never without a theme. 
He realized, as do few men, that the spirit 
of the Lord God was upon him, having ap- 
pointed him to preach glad tidings to the 
meek, to bind up the broken-hearted, to 
proclaim liberty to the captives and the 



The Preacher and Teacher 99 



opening of the prison to them that are 
bound. Preaching, with him, was always 
serious business. Some one has spoken of 
a certain style of orator "who mounted the 
rostrum, threw back his head, and left the 
consequences with God." But that was not 
Garrettson's style; his was "the preaching 
of a man aiming to be useful, aspiring to 
be good instead of great, penetrating by 
the arrows of truth into the sinner's heart, 
and pouring the balm of consolation into 
the wounded spirit. It was deep, experi- 
mental, and practical." One who heard 
him often thus describes him: "His action 
in the pulpit was not graceful, though it 
was solemn and impressive. His sermons 
were sometimes enlivened by anecdotes of 
a character calculated to illustrate the 
points he was aiming to establish. He was 
likewise deficient in systematic arrange- 
ment and logical precision. This deficiency, 
however, was more than made up by the 
pointedness of his appeals to the conscience, 
the aptness of his illustrations from Scrip- 
ture, the manner in which he explained and 
enforced the depth of Christian experience, 
and the holy fervor of spirit with which 
he delivered himself on all occasions. Like 
most other extemporaneous speakers, his 



100 Freeborn Garrettson 



mind sometimes seemed barren, and he 
failed, apparently for want of words, to 
express that on which his understanding 
appeared to be laboring. At other times 
his heart appeared full, his mind luminous, 
and he would pour forth a stream of gospel 
truth which abundantly refreshed the souls 
of God's people with the 'living waters.' 
And although his gesticulations were some- 
what awkward, there was that in his man- 
ner and matter which always rendered his 
preaching entertaining and useful; and sel- 
dom did the hearer tire under his adminis- 
tration of the word of life — point, pathos, 
and variety generally characterizing all his 
discourses." 

Garrettson was a believer in the system 
of Methodist theology as held by Wesley, 
Fletcher, and others, and taught the Wes- 
leyan doctrines all his life. Methodism was 
not a new theology, as we all know, though 
its preaching was in a real sense doctrinal, 
its effectiveness being proof of this fact, 
for the preaching which does not bring the 
central truths of the gospel home to the 
hearts of men cannot show such results as 
were seen in the Evangelical Revival of the 
eighteenth century. Wesley was not a theo- 
logian in the sense that Augustine was; 



The Preacher and Teacher 101 



his chief business was not to define meta- 
physical theology, but to bring men into a 
saving relation with a personal God and 
thereby into a joyous religious experience. 
The same may be said of Garrettson. His 
theology was for use. Especially did he 
seek to inculcate his belief in the doctrine 
of sanctification. A few years after he 
began to travel, while in North Carolina, 
he received the full baptism of the Holy 
Spirit, which, as did Nathan Bangs, he 
liked to refer to as "perfect love." This 
experience he rejoiced in continually and 
taught everywhere, and was himself a wit- 
ness to its truth; for no man, Dr. Bangs 
says, ever gave more irrefutable evidence 
of the holiness of his heart and the blame- 
lessness of his life. 

He was a stanch defender of the faith, 
and sometimes was drawn into controversy. 
In Rhode Island he was much annoyed with 
Socinian teachings which were being in- 
culcated in certain places, and preached 
against Socinianism. Never did his zeal 
show itself more intensely on any subject 
than when the real divinity, the eternal deity 
of Christ was called in question. He pub- 
lished a tract on this subject which showed 
his deep concern for this cardinal doctrine 



102 Freeborn Garrettson 



of Christianity. He felt it necessary on 
another occasion to preach against the pe- 
culiar sentiments of the Anabaptists, and 
was always ready to defend the tenets which 
he held. 

His writings, while not extensive, were 
important, his first publication being an ac- 
count of his early labors in the itinerancy, 
and the second a vigorous pamphlet against 
slavery. We have already seen how at his 
conversion Garrettson liberated all his own 
slaves, and thereafter his opposition to 
slavery as an institution was most pro- 
nounced and at times would seem to have 
been much in advance of his Church, al- 
though as early as 1780 the Conference of 
that year pronounced its judgment upon 
slavery as contrary to all laws, divine and 
human, and hurtful to society. 

Garrettson was also a leader in the tem- 
perance movement, taking ground in 1822, 
when the new chapel was built in Rhine- 
beck, that not a drop of spirituous liquor 
should be used by the workmen in its erec- 
tion. When told that such a thing was un- 
heard of, and that it would be quite 
impossible for mechanics to labor without 
rum to strengthen them, he was obdurate 
and the work was accomplished in accord- 



The Preacher and Teacher 103 



ance with this prohibition. His attitude 
in regard to the drink evil was most re- 
markable, when the social practices of the 
times in which he lived and the circle in 
which his family moved are taken into con- 
sideration. Garrettson was by nature and 
grace a foe of all kinds of evil, and had 
both capacity and courage for reforms. 

As the years multiplied he became more 
intense in all his work. "I am now bending 
over eternity and must soon go the way of 
all the earth. I endeavor in every sermon 
I preach to deliver it as if it were my last. 
I often think of my dear old friend, Bishop 
Asbury, who spent the last shred of his 
valuable life in the service of his great Mas- 
ter. I wish to do good, to be greatly taken 
up in my blessed Master's work, that my 
last days may be my best days." And God 
gave him the desire of his heart. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE ECCLESIASTIC 

Garrettson's ecclesiastical life covered 
the first half century of Methodism in 
America, and the record of his life for that 
period, on the authority of Stevens, is prac- 
tically the history of the denomination. 
From the first Conference which he at- 
tended in Baltimore in 1776 to the last one, 
held in Troy, New York, in 1827, the year 
of his death, he was one of the conspicuous 
makers of Methodism, being active and 
zealous from the beginning of his ministerial 
career, and giving invaluable aid at all 
times to the shaping of its polity and the 
carrying forward of its enterprises. Once 
he had joined the Methodists he was a rigid 
denominationalist, jealous of the traditions 
of Methodism, a lover of discipline and 
order, standing always for a strict interpre- 
tation of its early usages, cautiously con- 
servative, and ever manifesting the most 
stern and inflexible opposition to any in- 
novation upon the established doctrines of 
the Church. 

With Asbury and a few others he with- 
104 



The Ecclesiastic 105 



stood the earliest attacks upon Wesleyan 
Methodism in 1778 and 1779, when a serious 
schism was threatened, although Garrettson 
did not like the use of that term in con- 
nection with the brethren in Virginia who 
had urged that the sacraments might be 
administered by certain preachers who 
should be chosen for that purpose, holding 
that they had been misrepresented ; but be- 
yond question the situation was a critical 
one, and it required all the combined wis- 
dom, prudence, and forbearance of Garrett- 
son, Asbury, and Watters to avert the 
disaster and effect a reconciliation. Asbury 
was tactful, but not more so than Garrett- 
son. I doubt if there was a man in the 
itinerancy then or during his lifetime who 
had greater skill as a pacificator than Gar- 
rettson. His ability as a peacemaker 
amounted to genius. While he was a man 
of pronounced opinions, and at times was 
diametrically opposed to the proposals of 
some of his brethren, he was never an "ir- 
reconcilable." As he said late in life, "On 
the General Conference floor my brethren 
know that I have spoken the sentiments of 
my heart freely, always in favor of what I 
believed to be old Methodism, and I have 
upon all occasions as strenuously con- 



106 Freeborn Garrettson 



tended for peace and unanimity in the body 
and submission to the decisions of the 
majority." 

Garrettson was one of the first of the 
American preachers with whom Dr. Coke 
conferred upon his arrival in 1784, and 
when he unfolded to him the plan of Mr. 
Wesley, Garrettson writes, "I was some- 
what surprised when Mr. Wesley's plan of 
ordination was opened to me, and deter- 
mined to sit in silence." That was so 
characteristic of Garrettson, his unwilling- 
ness to commit himself until he had thought 
the matter through! Wesley was his 
"father in God/' Dr. Coke had come to 
America with the title of superintendent, 
but the young American, who had had 
nearly ten years of varied experiences in 
Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and 
elsewhere, was their peer, with an inalien- 
able right to individuality of judgment, a 
right which he always maintained. 

We have seen that Garrettson was the 
"herald" of the Christmas Conference, and 
in the deliberations of that body he gave his 
counsel freely in all matters pertaining to 
the organization of the Church, and in all 
the important discussions he was a con- 
spicuous figure. He must not be thought of 



The Ecclesiastic 107 



merely or chiefly as an itinerant preacher- 
evangelist, he was one of the wisest and 
most constructive counselors of the period. 
Asbury placed the highest reliance upon 
him. They frequently conferred together. 
Asbury was a most welcome guest in the 
home on the Hudson, where, sitting before 
the blazing fires of that hospitable mansion, 
they discussed the difficult questions of 
administration and planned for further 
itinerant advances. Whenever the leaders 
of the Church assembled Freeborn Garrett- 
son was of the number. His name is to be 
found among the members of the famous 
Council, which was convened by Asbury in 
1789. Nearly five years had passed since 
the Christmas Conference, and there had 
been no general meeting of the preachers. 
Asbury did not see the need of a General 
Conference, and proposed the formation 
of a Council, to be composed of men se- 
lected by himself, and with almost plenary 
powers. It met with much opposition and 
was only twice assembled. Garrettson was 
present both times, but the scheme was not 
to his liking. It was too much of a close 
corporation, there was too great power 
vested, according to Asbury's plan, in the 
head of the Council, and Garrettson was a 



108 Freeborn Garrettson 

consistent opponent all his life of exces- 
sive episcopal authority. At the General 
Conference of 1792, during the memorable 
controversy which was aroused by James 
O'Kelly, one of the most consecrated of 
the preachers but with a fiery love of free- 
dom, in his effort to secure a constitutional 
check to the absolute authority of the bishop, 
Garrettson supported him in the debate, but 
when O'Kelly's proposition was defeated, 
and he withdrew from the Conference, Gar- 
rettson refused to follow his example and 
was made a member of the committee ap- 
pointed to treat with him. Garrettson 
could never be charged with recalcitrance. 
He once expressed an unwillingness for 
climatic reasons to accept an assignment to 
a certain field, and was long troubled there- 
after in his conscience. But when he found 
himself in a minority he did not sulk, nor 
did he threaten. 

The refusal of his brethren at the Con- 
ference in 1787 to comply with Mr. Wesley's 
request that he be made a superintendent 
was a disappointment, but it did not sour 
him. Stevens thinks that the reason why 
Garrettson was not elected a bishop at this 
time was because the preachers did not 
regard this Conference as a General Con- 



The Ecclesiastic 109 



ference. It must be remembered, however, 
that Wesley had requested Bishop Coke to 
hold a General Conference at this time, 
and that much important business which 
properly belongs to a General Conference 
was done. As I have suggested in another 
place, the failure to elect Garrettson was 
probably due to the very evident hostility 
to Coke and Wesley, which was manifested 
in a variety of ways. One cannot help 
wondering what modifications our general 
superintendency would have undergone, if 
any, had the members of the Conference 
been in a mood to do as Wesley requested. 
It may be that there would have been some 
form of diocesan episcopacy, which cer- 
tainly would have had the approval of Gar- 
rettson. His opinion on this subject was 
most pronounced. At the last General Con- 
ference which he attended, that of 1824, 
according to Dr. Bangs the sessions were 
prolonged much beyond the usual time be- 
cause of the extended debates on lay repre- 
sentation. "Though Mr. Garrettson, in co- 
incidence with the majority of his brethren, 
thought it inexpedient, under present cir- 
cumstances," he says, "to grant the prayer 
of the petitioners for a lay representation, 
yet he seemed to think that some modifica- 



1 1 0 Freeborn Garrettson 



tion in the general outlines of the govern- 
ment might be usefully introduced. From ] 
what he has recorded in his Journal on 
this subject, it appears that he adhered to j 
the last to the opinion that each Annual j 
Conference should have its bishop, to travel 
annually through its bounds, to preside in 
its sessions, and to station, with suitable 
counsel, the preachers." Garrettson having, 
like Bishop Simpson, so strong a preference 
for a local diocesan episcopate, and being 
so firmly persuaded of the advantages of 
this kind of episcopal supervision and 
leadership, believing that better and more 
permanent good could be obtained for the 
Church by such a fixedness of episcopal 
jurisdiction, and the question having been 
so frequently discussed in their home, both 
Mrs. and Miss Garrettson requested that 
his views should be published in his biogra- 
phy. There is before me as I write a letter 
from Nathan Bangs to Mrs. Garrettson, in 
which he says that he "submitted the subject 
to the Book Committee and book agents and 
they unanimously advised to suppress it." 
The reasons given for this action are in- 
teresting reading. In brief they are as 
follows: An authorized publication issued 
from the Book Rooms should not contain 



The Ecclesiastic 



111 



sentiments in contradiction to the general 
economy of the Church as sanctioned by 
the officers of the Concern; and, moreover, 
no good would be accomplished by the pub- 
lication of the "plan," "as there is no proba- 
bility of his views being carried into effect." 
And so the "article in question" was ex- 
cluded from the Life of Garrettson which 
was brought out by the Book Concern 
within a few months after the date of the 
letter from which I have quoted. But it may 
be that this ecclesiastical statesman who held 
so tenaciously to these heretical views of 
episcopal supervision was not altogether 
wrong. He may have been wiser than his 
generation. Possibly it may be seen after 
a time, when redoubt after redoubt at the 
great centers in particular shall have been 
taken, that what we need is not so much 
general superintendency as local leadership. 

The New York Conference met in New 
York May 20, 181 1. Both Bishop Asbury 
and Bishop McKendree were present. One 
may read that the principal business was the 
election of delegates to the first delegated 
General Conference, to be held in the same 
city the following year. Henry Boehm, 
Bishop Asbury's traveling companion, who 
was also present, says: "There was con- 



1 1 2 Freeborn Garrettson 



siderable excitement and some electioneer- 
ing/' which may have been due to the fact 
that this was the first of the Conferences to 
elect delegates under the new order ! Free- 
born Garrettson headed the delegation, as 
he did at every subsequent election except 
1820 until his death. 

In more than one of these quadrennial 
Conferences the question of an elective pre- 
siding eldership was debated, Garrettson 
favoring it in every instance. At the im- 
portant Conference of 1808, in some re- 
spects quite as important as the Christmas 
Conference, when Bishop Asbury retired 
from the Conference while a letter to him 
from Bishop Coke was read, he called Gar- 
rettson to the chair; and later in this same 
Conference, when the debate on presiding 
elders had run its course, it was Garrettson 
who moved that the vote be taken by ballot, 
which was done, with the result that the 
battle again went against the champions of 
an elective presiding eldership. Again in 
1 812 this question was a foremost one, as 
indeed it was in many subsequent General 
Conferences, and concerning Garrettson's 
attitude in the matter his biographer says : 
"In respect to the question oil which the 
General Conference have long been divided 



The Ecclesiastic 1 1 3 



in sentiment, namely, whether the presiding 
elders should continue to be appointed as 
they now are by the bishops, or be elected 
by the Annual Conferences, it is well known 
that Mr. Garrettson was in favor of their 
election by the Conferences. This is men- 
tioned merely as an historical fact, without 
entering into the merits of the question, pro 
or con, or intending even to express an 
opinion in relation to it, any farther than 
to say that, whether right or wrong, no 
doubt can be entertained but that Mr. Gar- 
rettson acted from the purest motives, and 
according to the best dictates of his judg- 
ment." 

But Garrettson needs no apologies for his 
words or actions. The views which he advo- 
cated were not unworthy either of his heart 
or his intellect; they are still held by many 
devotedly loyal Methodists, and there have 
been some indications here and there in our 
denominational history which would seem 
to denote that there is at least some con- 
siderable basis even now for an honest dif- 
ference of opinion in this and the other 
questions of church polity to which Garrett- 
son gave so much thought. 



CHAPTER X 



HIS PERSONALITY 

What about Garrettson himself? What 
manner of man was he? For, after all, it 
is the person which counts in every work, 
and in no realm of life more than in the 
ministry. It is the commonplace of homi- 
letical literature that what a preacher is 
determines in the end the effect of what he 
teaches. Holiness of life is a prime requi- 
site for the successful preaching of the 
Word; it is itself a sermon. As Massillon 
said, "The gospel of most people is the lives 
of the priests whom they observe." Men 
will not believe a preacher who does not 
himself exemplify the cardinal teachings 
of the New Testament. Vanity, inordinate 
ambition, self-esteem, avarice, pride, and all 
other sins are fatal to ministerial efficiency. 
How often do we hear it said, "I would 
have enjoyed that sermon if I did not know 
the man!" It was Garrettson, more than 
what he said, that influenced men. He was 
indeed "an example of believers, in word, 
in conversation, in charity, in faith, in 
purity." "My first conviction when a boy," 
114 



His Personality 



115 



said an eminent Presbyterian minister, "was 
received from observing Mr. Garrettson as 
he was walking by. There was something 
so holy, so heavenly in his expression that 
I was strongly impressed with the truth of 
religion," Garrettson's power being largely 
in his goodness. 

He was a man of much prayer. He once 
said of Bishop Asbury that he prayed the 
most and prayed the best of any man he 
knew, and I doubt not that the mighty As- 
bury felt the same concerning him. It was 
Garrettson's common practice whenever he 
visited a place to repair at the first oppor- 
tunity to the church for private prayer. 
Those early Methodists believed in the effi- 
cacy of prayer. No matter, however trivial 
seemingly, could be determined without 
divine guidance, which they sought and 
found. Like Asbury, Garrettson spent a 
part of every hour in prayer. He said that 
the sweetest hour in the twenty- four was 
the hour from four to five in the morning 
when he talked with Jehovah. God's min- 
isters do not always find their revelations 
when standing on the altar steps ; some of 
their most glorious visions come when they 
are alone with God. Luther used to say 
that he could not get on without two hours 



1 1 6 Freeborn Garrettson 

a day for his private devotions. Dr. Ed- 
ward Norris Kirk, a Congregational min- 
ister of rare ability, confessed that his 
power as a preacher depended upon the de- 
gree of his communion with his Lord. Gar- 
rettson was a man of power, being a man of 
prayer. "That which gave such efficiency 
to his labor in the gospel," says his bi- 
ographer, "was the 'unction of the Holy 
One' which rested upon him. No man, I 
believe, was more deeply sensible of the 
indispensableness of the Holy Spirit to en- 
able the minister of Christ to succeed in his 
work than Mr. Garrettson. Deriving all 
his doctrines and precepts from the pure 
fountain of divine truth, the Holy Scrip- 
tures, he made these his daily study; and 
being deeply conscious that he must have the 
enlightening and sanctifying influences of 
the Holy Spirit to enable him rightly to 
understand and apply these truths, he was 
assiduous in his addresses to the throne of 
grace, firmly believing that God would 'give 
the Holy Spirit to them that ask him.' The 
success, therefore, which accompanied his 
public labors is not attributable to the force 
of human persuasion, or to the 'words of 
man's wisdom/ but to the 'demonstration 
of the Spirit' which accompanied his word." 



His Personality 1 1 7 



Like many of the most successful preach- 
ers of the Christian centuries, Garrettson 
was a Mystic, "a friend of God," as the 
Christian Mystics of the fourteenth century 
were called, and finding his Lord "in the 
inward way." Like Bunyan and others, he 
saw visions and dreamed dreams. "In a 
dream, in a vision of the night, when deep 
sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon 
the bed, then he openeth the ears of men, 
and sealeth their instructions." Both Mr. 
and Mrs. Garrettson profoundly believed 
in such spiritual influences. Their Journals 
and letters disclose what deep impressions 
were made upon them by "visions of the 
night," yet neither failed at all times "to 
try the spirits." How sane Garrettson was 
in the matter may be judged from this para- 
graph of his : "Some suppose that we ought 
not to put any dependence in dreams and 
visions. We should lay the same stress on 
them in this our day as wise and good men 
have done in all ages. Very great discov- 
eries were made to Peter, Paul, and others 
in their night visions. But is there not a 
danger of laying too much stress on them? 
We are in danger from a variety of quar- 
ters: let us therefore bring everything to, 
and try it by the standard ; taking the Spirit 



1 1 8 Freeborn Garrettson 



for our guide, and the written word for our 
rule, we shall without doubt go safe." He 
w r as neither fanatical nor foolish. 

Of Garrettson's singleness of purpose 
there is abundant evidence. This last sum- 
mer in London I found in a bookshop an 
old volume of sermons, the title of the first 
one of which attracted my attention ; it was, 
"Second Motive in the Ministry." The 
writer made his meaning plain in the first 
paragraph, in which he referred to two per- 
sons of the Scriptures, "both of whom 
seemed to have not only the outward vo- 
cation but who were apparently sound at 
the heart, but who gradually sank beneath 
one besetting sin which slowly and surely 
preyed on the vitals of their spiritual life — 
Balaam and Judas." The sin was the sin 
of covetousness, and was the admission of 
a second motive into the pursuit of the 
spiritual vocation, and each after passing 
through stage after stage of self-deception 
came to a fearful and hopeless end. There 
are other second motives ; it is hard to keep 
an eye single to the glory of God, but this 
Garrettson did. Personal, selfish ambitions, 
which are so destructive of the high ideals 
of the soul, were utterly foreign to hfs 
thought and feeling, nor was he tempted to 



His Personality 1 1 9 



covetousness. During the entire course of 
his ministry he never received any pecuni- 
ary compensation, being fortunately so 
situated as not to need it. The purity of 
his intention was never questioned. He was 
devoid of all subtlety and guile, and being 
honest and sincere himself he could not in- 
dulge in a suspicious temper toward others. 
It was once said to Robert Hall concerning 
Christmas Evans, "He has only one eye" ; 
Hall replied, "Ah, but that's a piercer ; why, 
sir, it is an eye to light an army through 
a wilderness in a dark night." Such was 
Garrettson's power of spiritual leadership, 
and it lay in this : he seems to have had but 
one thought, namely, to please God. This 
was his primary motive, and no secondary 
motive entered in to deflect him from the 
straight course which he had marked out 
for himself. He compelled confidence by 
the regnant purity of his motives and the 
dominant tone of his life. Like Paul, 
throughout his entire career he could say, 
"I seek not yours, but you." 

Mrs. Garrettson, in a letter which she 
wrote after his death, gives a beautiful inti- 
mate portrait of him: "Though my dearest 
friend" — she almost invariably referred to 
him as her "dearest friend" ; I do not recall 



120 Freeborn Garrettson 



a single instance in all her correspondence 
where she addressed him by his Christian 
name, it is always "My dear love," or "My 
very dear friend," or "My dearest husband" 
— "was often away, his punctuality in writ- 
ing made his absence less tedious. I have 
now upward of a hundred letters, written 
from various places, in all which he speaks 
of the heavy cross he finds in being absent 
from a family he so much loved; but still 
w r as enabled to rejoice in the work to which 
the Lord called. When he had been home 
for any length of time he became absent- 
minded and often in great heaviness. When 
we walked together I would try and divert 
his mind by calling on him to view all 
nature in her loveliness. 'O, yes/ he would 
say, 'it is all very beautiful; and God is 
very bountiful to us, my dear; but the 
burden of the Lord! souls are perishing; 
and this country is no field for me/ There 
was a continual conflict, so that I dared not 
make the least opposition to his visiting 
the churches ; for this was his element, and 
in this he was blest and made a blessing to 
others. . . . How many visits he made to 
Baltimore, to the Eastern Shore of Mary- 
land, to Washington, Georgetown, to Phil- 
adelphia, Connecticut, Boston, Newport, 



His Personality 121 



Schenectady, Albany, New York, and other 
places, since we married, I am not able to 
enumerate; but all will tell in luminous 
characters, in that day when he and the chil- 
dren God has given him shall assemble at 
the judgment seat of the Most High. All 
times of the night, and often at the break 
of day, has he landed from the steamboat, 
and come to his welcome home, to bless and 
praise our God together for keeping us 
while apart, and uniting us again in health 
and safety at his footstool. ... A more 
forgiving temper never existed in any mere 
mortal. He could keenly feel, but never to 
resent, never to retaliate. . . . While he 
was always ready to make amends, if he 
supposed that at any time he had spoken 
too hastily, he well knew at the same time 
what was due to his character and standing 
in the Church of God. . . . He was eco- 
nomical from principle, and always tried 
to instill into his family and in those over 
whom he had influence the right use of 
money. Show and parade he detested, call- 
ing it Saul's armor. He gave what he 
could and never laid up one cent of income. 
With a small property he has done more 
than many with ten times his means. With 
regard to himself, I always thought him too 



122 Freeborn Garrettson 



sparing, and often urged him to more per- 
sonal liberality. If he had been a man of 
the world he would have become very rich. 
With respect to his diet, no one need be 
more temperate. He was almost too ab- 
stemious. Of animal food he ate very 
sparingly, sometimes none. He was very 
diligent, indeed, indefatigable, until the end 
was accomplished. " 

All in all his was a strong personality. 
He was a man of cordial spirit, unostenta- 
tious, without affectation, a Christian 
gentleman of the finest type, of rare con- 
versational gifts and an amiable simplicity 
of manner, given to hospitality, unfailingly 
conscientious, ever more ready to commend 
than to censure, a lover of men, generously 
forgiving those who despitefully used him, 
without the passion of revenge, "of in- 
vincible gentleness, ,, and with the heart of 
a hero. 



CHAPTER XI 



THE ITINERANT'S LAST JOURNEY 

"The path of the righteous is as the 
dawning light, that shineth more and more 
unto the perfect day." More than one 
saint has confirmed the truth of this beauti- 
ful proverb, and none more than Mr. Gar- 
rettson. As the years multiplied his life 
became more and more glorious. The last 
years, as to activity, were much like his 
other years. He was an itinerant unto the 
very end. At the Conference which was held 
in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1817 he was 
returned as supernumerary, an appointment 
which hurt him somewhat until he was as- 
sured that it was made with a view to his 
convenience, and in order that he might be 
at liberty to labor wherever he thought he 
could be most useful. He was thus given 
an "appointment at large" and continued 
to itinerate as before, even when his grow- 
ing infirmities made it difficult for him to 
travel extensively. Still, as in other years, 
he must go out into the highways and by- 
ways seeking for the lost. "My mind," he 
says, "is after precious souls." Even when 
123 



124 Freeborn Garrettson 



he remained at home for a short time now 
and again "to bless his household/' he 
preached on the Sabbaths. Friends came to 
visit him; itinerant preachers, always wel- 
come, stopped on their journey ings to see 
him and counsel with him. The flowers in 
the garden at Wildercliff e bloomed for him, 
and the loved ones of the home circle 
counted it a joy to minister unto him. "I 
have had sweet seasons, in reading, writ- 
ing, and family devotions," he writes. But 
the aging itinerant hero must away! He 
revisits the scenes of his early triumphs; 
again he journeys to Connecticut, Rhode 
Island, and Massachusetts. "In five months 
I have traveled about a thousand miles, and 
preached whenever and wherever I could 
find an opening." He makes still another 
tour of the South, continuing to show an 
active interest in all the affairs of the 
Church. In 1819 he helped to form the 
Missionary Society of the Methodist Epis- 
copal Church, being one of the committee 
of three designated to prepare the consti- 
tution. In 1826 he preached his semicen- 
tennial sermon before the New York Con- 
ference, and was again appointed Con- 
ference missionary, and returning home 
was accompanied by Bishops McKendree 



The Itinerant's Last Journey 125 

and Hedding. Shortly after this, as will 
be seen by the following letter which ap- 
peared in The Christian Advocate in 1829, 
Mr. Garrettson and his daughter went to 
Schenectady. "The other day," the writer 
of the letter says, "while I was at the house 
of his much-respected and bereaved widow, 
I had the pleasure of looking over the last 
entry which Mr. Garrettson made in his 
diary, and of reading the last sentence which 
he ever wrote therein. I was particularly 
struck with it. It was written June 8, 1826, 
while at the house of his friend Dr. Nott, 
in Schenectady. It was as follows: Wed- 
nesday, 8. I am pleasantly situated and feel 
a pleasure in retirement. God is good to 
me.' I was not less struck with a little note 
directly opposite, supposed to have been 
penciled by one of his spiritual children, 
Rev. Ezekiel Cooper, which I here take the 
liberty to transcribe. It is as follows : 'He 
will not return to us, but we shall follow 
him. The close, "God is good to me"; 
— the last words, O my Father! Here he 
stops! He says no more to us. But no 
doubt his last words in this diary — "God 
is good to me" — he will repeat forever! 
E. C, Sept. 3, 1829.' " Thus the years 
passed, filled with the goodness of God. 



126 Freeborn Garrettson 

For several months before his death he 
seemed to feel the uncertainty of his life, 
and an impression of the shortness of his 
stay made him reluctant to stand for elec- 
tion as a delegate to the General Conference 
of 1828. He was elected, however, though 
before the Conference assembled he had 
entered upon his reward. In August, 1827, 
he went to New York to spend Sunday, 
expecting to return the first of the week. 
Sunday morning, August 19, he preached 
in the Duane Street church what proved 
to be his last sermon, from the text, "But 
grow in grace/' and administered the sacra- 
ment. The following day, in the home of 
his lifelong friend, Mr. George Suckley, he 
was seized with his last illness. The itin- 
erant had made his last journey. He who 
had been in the saddle almost constantly 
for fifty-two years was now to find rest 
from his labors. His wife and daughter 
hurried to him and remained with him 
through the days of terrible pain, but days 
also of quiet endurance and triumphant 
faith. His daughter, in a letter to the Rev. 
Richard Reece, who was the representative 
of the British Wesleyan Conference to the 
General Conference in 1824, and who be- 
came a strong friend of the Garrettsons, 



The Itinerant's Last Journey 127 

gives an account of this last illness from 
which I quote: "As he descended into the 
dark valley his views of the efficacy of the 
atonement became more and more enlarged. 
. . . Toward the last his strength was so 
much exhausted that articulation became a 
painful effort; but he would often, in a 
languid, feeble voice, say, '1 want to go 
home; I want to be with Jesus, I want to 
be with Jesus/ ... A day or two before 
his departure I heard him say, 'And I shall 
see Mr. Wesley, too/ It appeared as if he 
was ruminating on the enjoyment of that 
world, upon the verge of which he then was 
— enjoyments which he said a Christian 
could well understand. His mind seemed 
employed with subjects for the sweetest 
feelings of love and adoration. When asked 
how he did, he would answer, 'I feel love 
and good will to all mankind/ or, 'I see a 
beauty in the works of God' — forgetting 
that the infirmities of the body were the 
subject of the inquiry. He had resigned 
his wife and daughter into the hand of 
God, and so great was his desire to be 
with Christ that parting with us was 
robbed of its bitterness. . . . Never can I 
hope to give you more than a faint idea 
when the spirit achieved that last victory 



128 Freeborn Garrettson 



and was ushered into the joy of the Lord. 
Encircled by his kind and affectionate 
friends, his brethren and his sons in the 
gospel, my venerable father lay apparently 
unconscious of everything that concerned 
him. We felt truly that he was only leav- 
ing the Church militant to join the Church 
triumphant. Just as the period of his de- 
parture approached one of the preachers 
broke forth in prayer, a prayer so elevated, 
so holy that it seemed to wrap the hearers 
above all sublunary consideration, and as 
he commended the dying saint into the 
hands of God he prayed that the mantle of 
the departing patriarch might rest on his 
surviving brethren. His prayer seemed 
answered; a divine influence pervaded the 
apartment; two of the preachers almost 
sank to the floor under a glorious sense of 
His presence who filleth immensity." 

The last words which fell from his lips, 
spoken with the reverence of an adoring 
child of God, and with the exultation of a 
war-scarred veteran and conqueror, were, 
"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! 
Hallelujah ! Hallelujah !" It was the morn- 
ing of the 25th of September, 1827. The 
long journey had come to an end. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

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